PICTURE EXCLUSIVE: New vision of hell: colourised images of Warsaw Ghetto

A Wembley artist has had an unexpected “massive feedback” when he colourised and restored pictures of people in the wartime Warsaw Ghetto, and posted them on a Jewish genealogy website.

Richard Szerman was involved in researching his own family background when he began “repairing” grainy pictures from the Holocaust era. He was particularly interested in the story of his great-aunt, Bronislawa Emilia Szerman, who survived the war in Poland and died in 1968.

He came across the story of his “heroic” Catholic cousin, Jerzy Wojciech Gebski, who “smuggled guns into the ghetto and posed as a rubbish collector to take the rubbish out of the Warsaw ghetto. Under the rubbish he smuggled children”.

Mr Szerman said that Jerzy was a chemist, who “put his life and the rest of the family at risk trying to save the Jews and fight the Nazis”. He and his brother, Witold Gebski, fought side-by-side in the Ruczaj battalion in Poland.

While doing the family research Mr Szerman came across a Youtube film of people in the Warsaw Ghetto. “Each person was shown only for a second or so, but I started to freeze-frame the images, and gradually, I brought 20 people to life. They are not perfect, but almost certainly these people did not survive and do not have graves. We have to preserve what is left”.

He posted the images on Facebook’s Jewish Genealogy Portal and was overwhelmed by the response — “the messages came pouring in, around 2,000 replies”.

Now, Mr Szerman, who is raising money for Cancer UK with his project, hopes that perhaps someone will recognise a family member among his restored colourised images.