The story of Tereska, a Polish child survivor of World War Two and David ‘Chim’ Seymour, born Dawid Szymin, the Polish Jew and Magnum photographer who took a famous picture of her in 1948, constitute a powerful tale of the fragility of human life and the need to protect it. Seymour took Tereska’s photo in 1948 at a Warsaw school which kept troubled or displaced children suffering from the outcomes of the recent war. He was sent there by UNICEF, as part of a journey to Poland, Austria, Hungary, Italy and Germany to document the aftermath of the Second World War, especially the plight suffered by  children. When asked by the teachers to draw ‘home’ on a blackboard, other children at the Warsaw school drew idyllic little country houses, while the visibly disturbed Tereska scribbled an unreadable knot of squiggly lines, which looked more like a black hole. Looking at this picture to this day instills a mixture of fear, sadness and compassion.

For years the picture has circulated in photography and history books as an anonymous depiction of the terror of war, and was often presumed to document a Jewish girl pointing to her family’s disappearance in the Holocaust. In recent years though, an investigation has been made by two Polish journalists, Aneta Wawrzyńczak and Patryk Graziewicz. This breakthrough was prompted by the German philanthropist Gregory Siebknotten, who established a foundation helping children suffering from mental, physical or economic difficulties. He named it Tereska Foundation, in homage to the Seymour’s photo. This has in turn led the two researchers to the American writer Carole Naggar, an author of a monograph on Chim’s photography. They shared the effects of their investigation to her and that’s how the new book Tereska and Her Photographer, came into being.

Naggar’s research on Chim is extensive: beside a 2014 biography, she edited and introduced several books by him and better known Magnum photographers like Robert Capa. What pervaded Chim’s work was one subject: war. He was a primary witness especially in the Spanish Civil War and his images – of which a photobook was published in Poland in 1938, in Yiddish – focus on the difficulties faced by civilians, rather than on the battlefield. 

Naggar chose an unusual method for her book on ‘Tereska’, resulting from the lack of solid material. She decided to balance the scarcity with quasi-narrative novelistic fragments, ‘speaking’ through her characters. I must say I am least convinced by these fragments specifically. Naggar tries her best to simulate Chim’s and Tereska’s voices, but the latter especially fails – the subject is too delicate for the novelistic method, which would be better served by traditional factography or history writing. As in the books of the Swedish journalist Steve Sem-Sandberg, who in turns ventriloquized Ulrike Meinhof, Milena Jesenska and the head of the Judenrat in the Łódź ghetto, Chaim Rumkovsky, the task is controversial in its ethics, to put it mildly.

Seymour and Tereska’s brief meeting must have been hard to resist as a subject, as every aspect of it is so charged with the tragic history of the 20^th century. Chim himself, born in Warsaw in 1911, was lucky to escape the hecatomb of the Holocaust. With his parents, Regina and Benjamin Szymin, a respected publisher of Yiddish literature, he lived for some time in Odessa, Ukraine, then moved back to Warsaw and then Otwock, near the capital, noted for its large Jewish population. Chim went to study in Leipzig and then at the Sorbonne in Paris in late 1930s, thanks to which he managed to avoid the tragic destiny of his family, all of whom were likely killed during the liquidation of the Otwock Ghetto.

Chim found his calling in photography. He started as a freelance photojournalist in the early 1930s and went to Spain during the 1936-8 Civil War to cover it alongside his friend, Robert Capa, then left for the United States on assignment when World War Two broke out – as both a Jew and a socialist he would have been in extreme danger if he remained in Europe. He immediately enrolled as a photo interpreter in the US Army, and from 1942 worked for LIFE magazine. In 1947, he co-founded the Magnum Photos agency with Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he had befriended in Paris.

He was sent on the UNICEF ‘Polish assignment’ in 1948. In Naggar’s book there’s testimony of how the children’s helplessness disturbed him deeply. It is unclear, whether he suffered from ‘survivor’s guilt’, but going to Poland again, and to Otwock and Warsaw especially, left him emotionally drained. Seymour was particularly taken by Tereska, and titled the series emerging out of the assignment Children of Europe, Poland. He tried to look for her later, but she was untraceable. Chim was killed along with a fellow photographer during the coverage of the Suez conflict of 1956 by a sniper, who took them for soldiers during a truce.

Tereska’s destiny seems even more tragic. The first assumption, that she was a Holocaust survivor, led investigation to an impasse. The breakthrough was recognising from his pictures the Warsaw school for children requiring special care on Tarczyńska street, which miracoulously survived the war. There the researchers found a note about ‘Tereska’, finding out her name was Teresa Adwentowska. Then they looked for other Adwentowscy. The living family of Tereska recognised her, completely oblivious to her photographic fame. As they discovered, she was born in 1940, in a Polish family of a grocery store owner and a homemaker. The father was imprisoned by the Gestapo, the mother made do by trading with the Warsaw ghetto. After further investigation, the curious image Tereska drew on the blackboard was recognised as ruins of her home. During the Warsaw Rising in 1944, Tereska and her older sister survived bombings that left their home in tatters and killed their grandmother. A piece of shrapnel hit and wounded Tereska In the head. After that event the two went into hiding and walked for weeks around Poland without food. Without proper medical help and exposed to hunger, Tereska was left permanently traumatised.

According to the testimonies of her family, she never recovered. When she hit puberty and her younger brother was born, she became a danger to his health and was put into a mental instutution in Tworki. She lived there till her death in 1976. Until the very end, she harboured an obsessive feeling of hunger, which made her steal food from other patients. She became addicted to cigarettes and alcohol, which made her further treatment difficult. Beyond tragic and grotesque, she died choking on a chunk of food she had stolen and swallowed too quickly.

I am grateful to the Polish researchers for revealing this story to us, but in Naggar’s book, Tereska, for obvious reasons – lack of archival material – is left again almost mute. Bringing back the voice of Tereska and those other children who managed to grow into adults, will be the crucial task for future writers. The book gains, though, from its almost zine-like copybook format, with thin paper and low quality pictures, evoking the cheap paper of the presses Chim worked for in the 1940s. It puts Tereska’s story into a much needed context of her school counterparts, her city, her country and children from other countries, suffering similarly. For now, thanks to this book and the work involved, we understand perhaps a little better the depths of the trauma and senselessness of the war.