“The Jews’ Last March in Their Lives” – An Unknown Holocaust Photo from Dubno

1 Physical Attributes of the Photo

The subject of this paper is a photograph, a part of a series of 92 wartime images made by József Simkó (b. 1918), a soldier from Borsodnádasd, Hungary. The metal box containing the pictures was donated by Simkó’s family to the local museum collection, where they are kept even today. The size of the original picture is 8.18 × 5.77 cm. On the back of the photo, Simkó wrote with pencil: “the final hour of the Jews”, and with pen: “the Jews’ last march in their life, 20.05.1942, Dubno”. The photograph is black-and-white, and has a black marking in the upper left corner (Figure 1)

Figure 1:

“The Jews’ last march in their lives” – József Simkó’s photo of the Dubno Jews marching toward the killing field.

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2 History of the Photo

In the summer of 2023, Bence Erdős, a Hungarian genealogical researcher friend from Budapest called me and said that in Borsodnádasd’s local collection a previously unknown Holocaust photo had been found which he intended to publish on his company’s Facebook site. I convinced him that for the sake of authenticity and respect, the photo should be published first in the framework of a scholarly article which explains its significance, the historical circumstances and what the photo depicts. As a result, he put me in touch with Tibor Sági, leader of the local collection of Borsodnádasd, a village in the north eastern part of Hungary, who had found the photo in the museum.^[1] I received a good resolution scan of the photograph from him, and permission to publish it in Eastern European Holocaust Studies for the first time.

In recent decades, amateur and private photographs have become increasingly popular, along with growing accessibility. As the previous generation passed, many of their previously private collections ended up in internet databases and archives such as Fortepan,^[2] where anyone can have access, view, analyze, or use them for research. These databases not only publicize previously unknown photos and give the opportunity to interested people to use them, but salvage family heirlooms, shape collective memory, and they provide access to various – previously not necessarily known – aspects of the past, and thus broaden our knowledge concerning for instance everyday life, social norms, fashion, and so forth.

The subject of this paper fits into this process, as it is also part of a private person’s collection which came into focus due to its topic – the Second World War. At first glance, this photo seems like an ordinary wartime photo with people marching on a dirt road, in front of an embankment and trees – however, a closer look and the background information makes it unique. The picture was taken by a Hungarian soldier while he was serving at the Eastern front with the occupying Hungarian army. In the spring of 1942, he was witness to the liquidation of the Jewish population of Dubno, of which he also took a photograph. In the image we can see women and children marching in a long line – toward the pit where they would be massacred by the occupying German forces. Thus, this photo captures these people alive for the last time in their lives while at the same time it is a historical source documenting the so-called Holocaust by bullets (Desbois 2008).

3 The Holocaust in Dubno

The number of Jews living in Dubno reached 7,000 by the end of the 19th century. They made up half of the city’s population. Most of the local Jews were traders, artisans, or they worked in industry. Dubno was also one of the centers of the Haskalah and later on Zionism also struck roots here. The community had an extensive institutional network, including schools, a kindergarten, and a library; and vivid cultural life^[3] (Ajzik Feffer 1966, 173–180). All this changed, however, when the Second World War broke out.

In September 1939, Dubno was occupied by the Red Army and incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. Under the Soviet occupation, Jewish communal institutions as well as economic businesses were abolished or nationalized. Moreover, the leaders of the community were arrested. The situation got even worse in 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. German troops marched into the city on 25 June 1941 and anti-Jewish violence broke out: both the local non-Jewish population and the Germans attacked the Jews, and on several occasions, groups of Jews, altogether 1,000 people – among them those suspected of being affiliated with the NKVD – were executed by the Nazis and the Ukrainian auxiliary police (Segall 2012, 1,353).

In mid-July, the occupying forces organized a Jewish Council under Konrad Tojbenfeld’s leadership. Jews were required to wear a Star of David armband, and later on a yellow star, and they were conscripted for forced labor. They were also ordered to collect and hand over money, household items and precious metal items. On 2 April 1942, at the time of Pesach, the entire Jewish population as well as Jewish refugees – altogether approximately 12–13,000 people – were locked up in a ghetto established in the Jewish district. The area was surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire. Conditions in the ghetto were inhumane: among the overcrowded circumstances, people were starving and illnesses spread quickly. Those able to work could leave the ghetto in the morning, but they had to return in the evening; most of them did construction work or other useful work for the Germans (Segall 2012, 1,354).

In mid-May, the Germans divided the ghetto into two sections: in one of them, those who had a work permit could remain, while in the other were those who did not and thus were deemed “useless” by the Germans. The latter, a group of 4–5,000 Jews, were massacred by an SS squad from Rivne, the German gendarmerie and Ukrainian auxiliaries on 26–27 May in two locations: women, children and the elderly at the Surmychi airfield, and the men at Shybina Gora, in the outskirts of the city (Segall 2012, 1,354). The division of the ghetto dwellers was unpredictable and, according to the recollections of survivors, random:

They divided the ghetto into two parts. One part: people with trades or professions and the other part: people without trades or professions. And it was not necessarily as to whether you had a trade or not. It’s whether you were able to obtain a certificate. We were lucky, my father was able to obtain a certificate. The Germans gave it to him, that he worked for. And they made people move from one part to the other. During the night we heard yelling and screaming on the other side. And when we got up, there was nobody there anymore. Half the ghetto was emptied. I found out later what happened, at that time we didn’t know.^[4]

Julia Miller, who recounted these events, was later on saved by a Russian Jewish pharmacist who managed to get her out of the ghetto. Another survivor, Zora Alberts and her family escaped their deaths by sheer luck:

One day suddenly there was an order that the ghetto was going to be split in two. All the people who did not have working permits [sic] were going to be on the east side, and those who had permits, had to move to the other side. […] And there was another permit that needed to be gotten, and this cousin of my mother said, you have to go to the superior German and you have to take your gold watch. You have to say that your husband has been taken away and you have two children and you must have this permit, and then put that watch on his desk. So my mother did exactly as he said. And the man looked at her, took the watch, put it in the drawer and gave her the permit. […] That evening we were thinking, should we move tonight or tomorrow? My mother decided, let’s move tonight. […] The next morning at 5 o’clock, the other side was surrounded, and they marched them all out, outside of the city where enormous ditches were already dug. They marched them next to the pit and they shot them. We didn’t know what was happening, but we kept hearing shots.^[5]

Thus, whether someone survived this first selection and execution or not, depended on whether they had already obtained their work permits and conducted work for the German occupiers, and also whether they were able to find accommodation on the day when the ghetto was divided. Additionally, as Zora Alberts’s testimony shows, bribery could also play a role in the process, therefore being fit for work was only one factor among many on which survival depended.

In the following months, the ghetto dwellers prepared for the worst – especially since they kept hearing rumors about the liquidation of other ghettos in the General Commissariat of Volhynia-Podolia. On 5 October 1942, when the next Aktion took place, many Jews rather committed suicide instead of waiting for the perpetrators. On this day, the Germans murdered another 4,500 ghetto dwellers at the airfield, and afterwards they posted signs in the ghetto promising those Jews hiding that since they needed a workforce, no harm would befall them (Segall 2012, 1,354). After collecting most of this remaining Jewish population, the SS executed them with the assistance of the German gendarmerie and the local police at the end of October.^[6]

All the massacres were conducted in a similar manner: the Jews had to undress, get into the pit, and then they were shot in groups of 20. At the Einsatzgruppen Trial (1947–1948), Hermann Friedrich Graebe provided a harrowing testimony about the massacre he had seen in Dubno:

The people who had got off the trucks – men, women and children of all ages – had to undress upon the order of an SS man who carried a whip. They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and undergarments. […] Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells, and waited for a sign from another SS man who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes I stood near, I heard no complaint or plea for mercy. […] At that moment the SS man at the pit started shouting something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound. […] I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people shot were still moving. […] I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an SS man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy-gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, went down some steps which were cut in the clay wall of the pit and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the SS man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people […]. Then I heard a series of shots.^[7]

The description of the events suggests that the killings happened in broad daylight and passers-by were not forbidden to go there and witness them. According to a non-Jewish witness, both local non-Jews and Jews were aware of the future fate of the Jewish population: “The Jews were taken to the shooting by truck at night. It was extremely quiet in the town the following day. All the Jews had been killed the night before. They knew that it would happen because there were rumors around.”^[8] Several Jews went into hiding or brought their children to friendly non-Jewish neighbors and asked them to hide them.

The massacre of the Dubno Jews fits into a larger pattern: ghettos established in Ukraine from the autumn of 1941 were liquidated from spring 1942. This wave of mass murder affected especially the territory, where the General Commissariat of Volhynia-Podolia (including Dubno) was located (Snyder 2015, 222–23). However, Dubno’s role as a center of one of the administrative regions (Gebiet) was also important: in fall 1941, the German civil administration took control, and in September, Walter Brocks was appointed County Commissar (Gebietskommissar). Ghettoization in the region took place under his leadership (McBride 2016, 16). By the liberation on 9 February 1944 and the end of the war, only a handful of Jews remained in Dubno – according to certain sources around 300,^[9] but others provide a lower figure^[10] – many of whom had escaped to the Soviet Union when the Germans occupied the territory.

4 The Perpetrator Photo as a Source

As the period of the Holocaust becomes increasingly remote in time, there is less and less risk in revealing previously hidden photographs: most survivors and perpetrators have passed away and the possibility of being called to account for participating in anti-Jewish persecution has decreased significantly. On the other hand, the opportunity for historians to discover such photos – and possibly ask uncomfortable questions about how the owner came by them, has increased. Holocaust photographs can not only serve as evidence (Struk 2020) but also as important historical sources: they convey information about local events, actors, circumstances. Apart from iconic Holocaust photos which show the inner workings of the “death factory” directly or atrocity photographs, images not depicting physical destruction or violence have also raised the interest of historians (Gutman and Gutterman 2004). The significance of such photographs is reflected by the fact that in recent decades several articles and books have been published which focus on this type of source – one of the most famous is probably Wendy Lower’s The Ravine – A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, which reconstructs the destruction of a Jewish family in Miropol, occupied Ukraine.

A moral controversy surrounds “perpetrator photographs” – i.e. images taken by the perpetrators: as many of them were captured during instances of active persecution, they convey the perpetrators’ point of view, and as such, they are regarded a part of the destruction apparatus (Sánchez-Biosca 2015, 377). At the same time, they depict victims in humiliating, dehumanizing situations, sometimes even at the brink of death – circumstances which may revictimize them when seen by others (Pető 2009, 39–56). The two probably most well-known collections are the “Auschwitz Album”^[11] and the “Höcker Album”^[12] which could be considered matching counterparts. The first one depicts Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, while the second documents the life of their guards during the same period. The two albums are prime examples of perpetrator photos which demonstrate not only the striking differences between the circumstances of the Nazis and their victims, but also the “viewpoint” and perspective of the perpetrators.

Nowadays most Holocaust researchers agree that the historical value of such photos outweigh the above arguments: the analysis of these pictures may expose local circumstances, they can help identify both perpetrators, onlookers, and victims – and thus can restore the victims as “subjects, not objects, of history” (Lower 2021). This memorial recovery not only gives back the victims’ personality, but shapes the visual repertoire of and converts the genocidal event from abstraction to reality for the viewer. Additionally, as Wendy Lower argues, it contributes to avoiding desensitization which would inevitably occur if we did not know as much about the photos’ background history and context as possible (Lower 2021).

The photo of the Jewish women walking towards their death in Dubno is not an exception: it also confronts us with the reality of the Holocaust. Several details of the photo can help us narrate the story of this picture. Let us start with the person that is the photographer. József Simkó was a sergeant, according to Tibor Sági’s information, in the 43rd Infantry Regiment, part of the Hungarian occupying forces on the Eastern front. However, Ákos Fóris, a researcher of the Hungarian army’s activities on the Eastern front, states that this regiment was not dispatched to the front in 1941–1942; during this period the 54/I Battalion from the 124th Infantry Brigade’s 54th Infantry Regiment was stationed around Dubno. Unfortunately, since archival sources are scarce, it is difficult to reconstruct the activities of these military forces.^[13]

Simkó was a keen photographer, documenting his experiences and circumstances in several pictures. In his collection of almost a hundred photographs, three types of main subject can be distinguished: buildings, the everyday life of the soldiers, and local civilians.^[14] Certain photos – for instance one taken in the Dubno castle with the inscription “good view over the town” – suggest that he had a tourist’s attitude, and visited local places of interest taking pictures in order to make memories of his time spent on the Eastern front. This is in sharp contrast with the historical circumstances, i.e. being a soldier in an occupying army, and witnessing the execution of the local Jews.

When taking the photo of the marching Jews, Simkó was standing on the other side of the dirt road, facing the direction of the group in order to capture their faces. He obviously knew what was about to happen to them – as the inscription on the photo’s back also proves – which is the reason why he felt inclined to document the event. Simkó’s inscription on the back of the photo is not sympathetic toward the victims – at best it can be considered neutral, the remark of a spectator who did not feel empathy towards the subjects of his photo. This is unsurprising, taking into account that Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany, and anti-Semitic propaganda had permeated everyday life there since the end of the 1930s (Braham 1997, 158, 228, 442).

The date written on the back of Simkó’s photo is incorrect which might be the result either of the ink fading or the fact that he added the lines written in ink later and when doing so he did not remember the exact date. The latter hypothesis seems more likely as this is the only photograph in his collection which has an inscription in ink.^[15] Identifying the exact location where the photo was taken would be close to impossible due to changes to the landscape and the scarce details of a built-up environment in the picture. However, it is known that Jewish women and children were taken from the ghetto (coordinates 50°25′01.8″N 25°44′39.2″E) to the airfield (coordinates 50.395500, 25.784074), via today’s Stara, Vulytsya Surmychi, and Semydubska streets, finally turning onto a nameless dirt road which leads directly to the former airfield.^[16]

In the foreground of the picture, the viewer can see a wide road on which, towards the middle of the photo, several people are walking in a disordered line. The marching group reaches the frame on the left side, while the end of the line can be seen on the right. Zooming in on the people, it becomes obvious that most of them are women and girls. They are wearing headkerchiefs and short skirts, which indicates that the weather was indeed warm, characteristic of late spring. Proliferating vegetation in the background also indicates this. The women’s shadows are long, referring to the time of day – early morning – when, according to the witnesses, the mass murder was carried out (Segall 2012, 1,354). While their faces can barely be seen as the photograph is slightly blurry, we can still spot some of them looking in the direction of the photographer. On closer inspection, a small number of men can also be seen in the crowd – they are wearing flat caps.

Among the marching people, certain groups can be observed: these are people turning towards each other and walking in close proximity, as if they were discussing something or helping each other. In certain cases, there are clusters made up of children and middle aged or older women – most probably family members keeping together. Interestingly, it seems that the first few lines of the crowd are hurrying or running – they are leaning forward and their strides are much longer than those of the people behind them.

What is striking in the photo at first glance is the lack of guards: the viewer must zoom in on the very end of the line to discover a figure in a uniform wearing an armband. Another guard is walking towards the middle of the column, on the far side – only his head, chest, and upper left arm can be seen with a similar armband. The picture’s quality does not allow for any identification of this uniform, nor can we see whether they are holding any weapons, however, most probably the guards were Ukrainian auxiliary policemen (Rossoliński-Liebe 2016, 114). This might explain the change of pace of the group, as the guards might have urged them to march faster.

The photograph has a gender dimension too: as research into local events has proven, women and men were killed at different locations. It is a well-known fact that originally the Einsatzgruppen were ordered to murder Jewish men of military service age, and only about a month after the beginning of the military campaign in June 1941, did an order arrive, presumably from Reinhard Heydrich, that they were supposed to kill Jewish women and children too (Kay 2013, 424). Since this decision had been made well before the massacre of the Dubno Jews, there must have been another reason for separating men and women before the killing – which was, in fact, a common practice in the region. Perhaps the idea was the same as in the case of the selections at Auschwitz-Birkenau: separating family members from each other, so women and children were put into a vulnerable position without the heads of their families to protect them. Among such circumstances it was easier to achieve the obedience and even subordination of the victims.

Finally, the photograph’s significance for the history of the Hungarian Holocaust must be mentioned: the Jewish community of Dubno was annihilated in 1942, approximately two years before the ghettoization and mass deportation of the Hungarian Jews. Hungarian Holocaust historians have emphasized that information and rumors about the “Final Solution” circulated among the political elite, civil servants and even ordinary people from 1941 (Braham 1997, 767–809), and Ákos Fóris’s research proves that the Hungarian political elite and civil service received an abundance of information from the army about the genocide taking place in the East (Fóris 2017, 201–11). Inevitably, ordinary soldiers also witnessed the atrocities; moreover, observing and documenting the massacres became so widespread, that in October 1941, the commanders of the Hungarian occupying forces prohibited taking photos of Einsatzgruppen activities. The pretext was that such photos might be used for agitation against Hungary and her allies, while in reality the aim was to silence war crimes and the extent of the massacre (Fóris 2014, 342). Thus, it seems that Simkó was not the only one interested in the “final hour of the Jews”, rather, it was a common phenomenon in the army. So much so that despite the prohibition, apparently soldiers kept on taking pictures even afterwards – as the date of Simkó’s photo proves. This also raises the question of the Hungarian army’s and individual soldiers’ responsibility in the “Holocaust by bullets” as they were witnesses to and were fully aware of the massacres. However, this topic was silenced in post-war Hungary, and even today it is rarely talked about or investigated.

The misconception that in Hungary no one knew about the Holocaust until the last minute is still widely believed today.^[17] This might also be the result of the fact that images such as Simkó’s were stashed away after the war, and kept within the families even after the death of the photographers. Thus, these pictures could not influence common knowledge, and only after the generation which could have been called to account had passed away were the “skeletons in the closet” found. This leads me back to the initial observation of this paper, namely that as time passes by, more and more such photographs have turned up and will be available to researchers – and hopefully, just like the image from Dubno, they will facilitate the refutation of the above-mentioned myth.