The premiere of the 2nd edition of the photo album “Warszawa Siemaszki” took place on December 22. The pictures of Zbyszko Siemaszko from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s immortalized Warsaw and helped his comrades in Home Army.
Zbyszko Siemaszko has been involved in photography since childhood. When he joined the Home Army – more specifically, Szczerbiec – the 3rd Partisan Brigade of the Home Army – together with his brothers and father during the war, he assumed the pseudonym Swojak (English: countryman) and began to document the everyday life of partisans with a Leica camera.
He photographed preparations for operations and moments of rest following completed operations and made portraits of soldiers. As he said himself, he did not photograph battles because they took place mainly at night and he actively participated in them himself. During an operation in 1944 Zbyszko was gravely wounded twice in the head, captured by the Germans and taken over to the Gestapo. Luckily, his friends managed to liberate him from the prison hospital the following day.
Of 900 photographs taken by Zbyszko Siemaszko during the war, only around 300 have survived. Currently, the Photographic Archives of Zbyszko Siemaszko collected inthe NDA comprise 6,000 negatives dating from the beginning of the 1950s until the 1990s.
The first edition of the album from 2014 is available here.