’33 Photos from the Ghetto’ Review: Reconstructing the Uprising Through Hidden Photographs (HBO Max)

These photographs have never been published before. I deliberately kept them for so long, with the idea of releasing them when the world begins to forget these things,” reads one of the diary entries written by Polish amateur photographer Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski. Those 33 photographs—whose negatives were discovered only recently and then restored—are the only known images of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that exist outside of those taken by the Nazis for propaganda purposes.

This documentary builds on the discovery of that roll of film to recount the story of the Nazi invasion of Poland, the creation and daily reality of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto, and what unfolded there: starvation, disease, deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp, the 1943 uprising, and the subsequent Nazi destruction of much of the city, ending with the arrival of the Soviet army. Running alongside this historical account is the personal story of the photographer himself, his family, and a Jewish girl they helped hide during the war.

Director Jan Czarlewski devotes the first half of the film to explaining and contextualizing what was happening in Warsaw from the moment of the Nazi invasion, detailing how the ghetto was established and what life inside it was like. At the same time, Grzywaczewski’s descendants and historians of the period provide specific details about Leszek’s life. Much of the narrative is also anchored in the testimony of Roma Laks, who recounts her survival as a young girl in the ghetto, allowing viewers to experience events from the inside, through the eyes of someone who knew Leszek personally. Laks took refuge for a time in the Grzywaczewski apartment and vividly recalls hiding in a small mezzanine while German soldiers visited the place.

The film’s second half maintains this family-centered approach but shifts its focus more directly to the uprising itself, which began in April 1943. Here, specialists attempt to place some of the photographs within their precise temporal and spatial context, walking through present-day Warsaw to locate the same sites and, at the same time, interpreting what specific events the photographer secretly captured while entering the ghetto in his role as a firefighter. Two sequences stand out in particular, analyzed in meticulous detail and seemingly corresponding to especially harrowing moments of the uprising and its brutal aftermath.

One set of images shows a building set ablaze by the Nazis, who watch as bodies lie in view and a handful of survivors linger—people who would soon be murdered. The other consists of a series of stark, devastating photographs taken from a window of St. Sophia’s Hospital, showing men, women, and children being marched toward the Umschlagplatz, the transit point from which Warsaw’s Jews were loaded into cattle cars bound for the gas chambers of Treblinka.

33 Photos from the Ghetto functions as a message left behind by the photographer for future generations. These images—and others he managed to smuggle out of the ghetto over the years—have gradually come to light as a way of keeping alive the memory of what happened there. “We have to remember, because if we don’t, it will happen again,” says Roma, an eyewitness to the events. In today’s political climate, marked by persecution in various parts of the world that often carries an ethnic dimension, that statement resonates more strongly than ever. As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles and collective memory fades, situations disturbingly similar to those of the past begin to reappear. In that sense, these photographs and testimonies are not just historical documents, but urgent reminders—meant to ensure that this memory does not disappear.