Son finds pictures taken by his father 80 years ago. Unknown photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising

When everything had been double-checked, I reached for the last cardboard box in the attic at my sister’s house. And, like in a classic thriller, the last roll of film taken out of the last box of that carton turned out to be the wanted negative — recalls Maciej Grzywaczewski, an oppositionist from the communist era. Photos were taken by his father, Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski, a Polish firefighter who extinguished fires in the Warsaw Ghetto.

These are the only known photographs from the ghetto uprising in 1943 that were not taken by the Germans. 12 prints, stored in the Washington Holocaust Museum, were until now known only to a handful of Holocaust researchers. A month ago, Grzywaczewski’s son miraculously found the entire negative from 80 years ago. “Newsweek Polska” is the first medium publishing these new photos. Starting in April, they will be on display at a special exhibition dedicated to the ghetto uprising at Warsaw’s POLIN Museum.