This week, amidst the nauseating hypocrisy of official VE Day celebrations, you may well see the iconic photograph of the Soviet flag being raised above the German parliament building in Berlin.
The photo was a posed shot: Yevgeny Khaldei, the photographer who took it, never pretended otherwise. He made the flag himself, from three red table-cloths.
The officer holding the flag-bearer’s legs has a watch on both wrists, suggesting he could be a looter, and one of these was hurriedly scratched out of the image before publication.
None of this takes away from the significance of the defeat of Nazism, with which the photo is associated. But history is never straightforward. In the post-war Soviet Union, Khaldei’s wartime photos were celebrated, but as a Ukrainian Jew he faced censorship and discrimination.
Here is an article I wrote about Khaldei, published in the Herald, Scotland’s leading daily, on 15 February 1999. (It’s the second of two I have dug out for VE Day: here’s the first one, about Vasily Grossman.)
The photo was a posed shot: Yevgeny Khaldei, the photographer who took it, never pretended otherwise. He made the flag himself, from three red table-cloths.
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| Yevgeny Khaldei’s iconic Berlin photo, May 1945 |
The officer holding the flag-bearer’s legs has a watch on both wrists, suggesting he could be a looter, and one of these was hurriedly scratched out of the image before publication.
None of this takes away from the significance of the defeat of Nazism, with which the photo is associated. But history is never straightforward. In the post-war Soviet Union, Khaldei’s wartime photos were celebrated, but as a Ukrainian Jew he faced censorship and discrimination.
Here is an article I wrote about Khaldei, published in the Herald, Scotland’s leading daily, on 15 February 1999. (It’s the second of two I have dug out for VE Day: here’s the first one, about Vasily Grossman.)
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Yevgeny Khaldei’s shot of Red Army soldiers flying the Soviet flag over the burning Reichstag as they took Berlin in May 1945 became one of the twentieth century’s landmark photographs. But other pictures by Khaldei, the greatest Soviet war photographer, are only now coming to light.
One of the images buried for decades by Soviet censorship is a portrait of a Jewish couple, taken in the Budapest ghetto in January 1945.
The Red Army, with five months’ eastward march to Berlin still in front of them, had just liberated Hungary. Khaldei, himself a Jew, approached the couple wearing a black leather coat. They froze in fear, not knowing which side he was on.
Khaldei walked up, tore from their coat the Stars of David they were forced to wear by Nazi law, greeted them in Yiddish and told them they had been freed. The woman burst into tears.
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| A Jewish couple, Budapest, 1945. Photo by Yevgeny Khaldei |
After the war, countless Soviet publications were adorned with Khaldei’s photographs – of Stalin, Marshal Zhukov and other war leaders; of devastated Europe; of the Potsdam conference and the victory celebrations; a unique snatch shot of [Hitler’s deputy Hermann] Goering at the Nuremberg trial [of Nazi war criminals], and many more.
Other images were deemed unfit for publication. The censors who decided newspaper readers should not see Khaldei’s picture of sunbathers amid the runs of Sevastopol were, perhaps, motivated by a combination of prudery and paranoia typical of their trade.
But the reason the old Jewish man and wife in Budapest were made invisible was more sinister. In the last years before Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet elite itself stoked up Russian antisemitism for its own purposes. The story of the war was retold in a way that downplayed the Nazis’ antisemitism.
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee formed in Moscow during the war was disbanded. Its leader, the theatre director Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered by the secret police. Other Jewish war heroes suffered: Leopold Trepper, who headed the Soviets’ famous spy network in occupied Europe, the “Red orchestra”, returned to seven years’ imprisonment on trumped-up charges.
In fear, Khaldei smashed his negatives of Mikhoels and other victims. He, too, became a victim, getting sacked from [the Soviet news agency] Tass in 1950.
In 1957 Khaldei got a job on Pravda, the leading Soviet daily – touring the USSR to photograph “the building of communism”, in which he passionately believed. In 1972 he was sacked again, in another bout of official antisemitism.
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| Sunbathers in Sevastopol. Photo by Yevgeny Khaldei |
The Budapest photo only saw light in an international exhibition on the 50th anniversary of VE Day in 1995. When Khaldei died aged 80 in 1997, it had still not been displayed in Russia; that only happened last year [1998].
Khaldei was born in Donetsk, Ukraine, in March 1917, and suffered from being Jewish from the start. He was a year old, lying in his mother’s arms, when an antisemitic mob broke into the house and killed her and three other adults. He survived not because the mob spared him, but because he was lucky. He was hit by a bullet but lived.
Khaldei made his first camera from his granny’s old spectacles and a cardboard box. As famine swept through Ukraine in the wake of forced collectivisation of its farms, Khaldei, aged 13, started work in a railway depot. He was obsessed by photo-magazines and his hero was Charlie Chaplin.
In 1936, after a spell on his local paper, he was signed on by Tass and moved to Moscow.
During the war, as Khaldei raced from front to front taking photos, often together with the novelist and war reporter Konstantin Simonov, the rest of his family perished in Nazi-occuped Ukraine. His father and three sisters were thrown alive down a mine shaft by German troops.
Today [1999], in post-Soviet Russia, antisemitism is alive and well – most significantly in the Communist party, the largest parliamentary party, which preserves this ugly aspect of Stalin’s ideology in a “red-brown” alliance with openly fascist groups.
Jewish organisations have criticised parliament for failing to censure the Communist deputy, General Albert Makashov, who was filmed railing against “kikes, Shylocks and bloodsuckers”, and Viktor Ilyukhin, chairman of the parliamentary security committee, hwo recently said there are “too many Jews” in president Yeltsin’s entourage. In Krasnodar, southern Russian – whose governor, Nikolai Kondratenko, is rapidly antisemitic – Jewish homes have been attacked.
All this adds significant to efforts by Khaldei’s daugher Anna and son Leonid to make his heritage better known in Russia. In north-west Moscow, in the modest sixth-floor two-room flat where Khaldei lived, Leonid said: “My father’s work is probably better known abroad than it is here. We are going to change that.”
More than 120 prints were included in an exhibition in Moscow last September. “We had to leave out many wonderful pictures. There are more than 200”, said Leonid.
Apart from the flat – a crowded jumble of magazines, cameras, prints and negatives – Khaldei left his wartime Zenit, a 400mm SpeedGraphic given to him by [the famous Hungarian-American war photographer] Robert Capa, and a set of war medals weighing more than two kilos.
đ´ More about the Reichstag photograph here and here.
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