Budapest, January 1945, ca. 1945

About the Work

The insecurity is clearly written on their faces: the Jewish stars on the jackets of the portrayed couple still bear witness to the barbaric terror which the Nazis had subjected them to. The photograph was taken during the battle of Budapest in January 1945, during which Yevgeny Khaldei was involved in the liberation of the occupied city as a soldier and propaganda photographer for the Red Army. According to his own statements, he tore off the couple’s enforced anti-Semitic identifiers after taking the photo. Khaldei came from a Jewish-Ukrainian family whose members – except for one sister – had all been murdered. He wanted to memorialise the victims of the Holocaust by publishing the print in Eynikayt (Unity), the official newspaper of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR.