Architect Harry Gesner and (right) the photographer John Balsom[Missing Credit]
Clockwise: Allied veterans on a Da-Day beach in Normandy; Guta Benezra, who was born in Minsk, and here photographed in Hadera, Israel; the late communist Sam Apter[Missing Credit]
Since then, Balsom has been all over the world to meet and photograph people whose wartime experiences he hopes to tell through his pictures. Most have been of Holocaust survivors.
“All of these have come from introductions,” he says, as he flicks through the beautiful prints of those who shared their experience with him.
Most recently, in London, Balsom met with Eva Clarke, who was born on April 29, 1945, at the gates of Mauthausen, just days before General Eisenhower’s forces liberated the camp in Austria. He photographed her alongside Merrill Eisenhower, the great-grandson of the military hero who went on to become US president. Earlier this year the pair visited Auschwitz together for the March of the Living, for which they act as ambassadors.
Balsom’s first introduction to a survivor came through a friend many years ago in New York, where he used to live. “She would say to me, ‘You should meet my grandmother, she’s got an amazing story.’ So I travelled to Sedona, Arizona, to meet Nika Fleissig.”
Nika Fleissig and (right) Eva Clarke, the last baby to be born in Mauthausen concentration camp[Missing Credit]
Born in Krakow in 1920, Fleissig survived the Shoah by assuming a false identity as a non-Jew. Her brother and parents were all transported to Auschwitz where they were murdered. “Nika was a force of energy and I feel nourished from the experience of spending time with her,” says Balsom, adding that he was brought to tears several times in her company.
Some of his other subjects were introduced to him following a chance encounter in a park close to his home in north London several years ago. “I took my son out to play football and a little girl chased it and they ended up playing together,” he recalls. “I started talking to her mum and when I asked her what she did for a living, she told me she was a professor of child Holocaust survivors, which made my jaw drop. We started talking, exchanged numbers and I told her about my project.”
The girl’s mother was Dr Joanna B. Michlic, an author and scholar of the Holocaust and of Jewish childhoods. She subsequently introduced Balsom to a fellow historian in the US, who put him in touch with two other survivors. Michlic says of their collaboration: “John is a terrific photographer with an incredible passion for Second World War history and Holocaust survivors. I am glad that as a scholar I could have guided him to different survivors in the US, Poland and Sweden, and provide the necessary historical context for his moving pictorial accounts of survival, resilience and fragility.”
Balsom wasted no time in acting on these introductions. He flew to Boston to photograph Rabbi Joseph Polak, who was born in The Hague in 1942 and who was later transported to Westerbork and then Bergen-Belsen. He lost his father and 30 other relatives in the Shoah and has written about his experience in his award-winning memoir, After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring. He told Balsom he had been among a group of Dutch children who, after liberation, were transported to safety by an African American Army corp of truck drivers.
From left: Rabbi Joseph Polak and his wife, Reisa; a war veteran in Normandy[Missing Credit]
“He tried to find them in later life but couldn’t,” says Balsom. “When I was visiting and photographing him he told me his story and said, ‘Don’t forget this wasn’t just a white people’s war.’”
Originally from Lodz in Poland, Leon Weintraub today lives in Stockholm, which is where Balsom flew to photograph him. “At the end of the portrait session, Leon said, ‘In two weeks’ time, I’m in Poland escorting the German police back to some of the death camps that I survived. Would you like to join me?’” says Balsom. “So naturally I said ‘absolutely’. I pulled out of a paid job because I thought, ‘This is never going to happen again – I have to go.’”
Balsom joined the trip with the German police, Weintraub and his family, and representatives of Yad Vashem. He has since returned to Stockholm to meet Weintraub again and also accompanied him and his family to Auschwitz last year for the official ceremony commemorating 80 years since the end of the war.
Elisabeth Bellak, a former child actor who survived the Shoah by posing as a Catholic in Nazi-occupied Poland and (right) the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman who escaped the Nazis by fleeing Poland for the USSR. In 1968, he was forced to leave Poland again[Missing Credit]
A French resistance fighter at the 80th anniversary of its liberation of the Normandy landings in June 2024 and (right) Krakow-born Nika Fleissig[Missing Credit]
But on the day of the official event, Balsom was denied access by the authorities at the former death camp. So he and Weintraub returned there for a photo shoot the following day, while Weintraub’s family walked around the death camp. “He had three generations of his family with him but because he wanted to help me finish my project, he didn’t, unbelievably, go with them,” says Balsom.
Dita Kraus[Missing Credit]
Weintraub, who turned 100 this month, lost his mother and one of his sisters at Auschwitz. He managed to miraculously escape by joining an outgoing transport of inmates to another concentration camp. He says he and Balsom “have become friends” since the photographer first contacted him a couple of years ago, adding that he didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation to be photographed. “I do every thing that can help to make people think differently. I have spent many years in Holocaust education and will continue participating as long as I am able to.”
Balsom estimates that he has spent more than £100,000 of his own money pursuing his Shoah project, a mission which has taken him to America, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Israel, among other countries. Until now, the photographs have never been published.
So what has made him pursue this “deep passion project”, as he describes it? “My mother has often asked this very question and I’m not sure I know the answer. What I do know is that the project is incredibly important to me and that I have been doing it for 13 years. When a Holocaust guide in Lodz asked me why I’m doing this and I gave the same answer, she replied that I might have a dybbuk living in me.”
For those who believe in the notion of a dybbuk – a restless soul wandering between heaven and earth, which manifests itself in its victim’s body, causing involuntary thoughts and actions – this might make sense. The rest of us might be more interested to learn that a recent DNA test revealed that the photographer, whose maternal grandfather grew up in the heart of the Jewish East End, is 3.9 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish.
“When I lived in Brooklyn, Chasidic Jews would always come and talk to me,” he says. “I would ask them if I looked Jewish and because they often replied yes, I did a DNA test.”
Meanwhile, when it comes to photographing remaining Shoah survivors, time is now very much of the essence and while Balsom would love to continue photographing them and other Second World War veterans, he has run out of road in terms of funding. To this end, he would love to find a financial backer with whom he could collaborate on the project.
“I’d like to think this is quite a positive project,” he says. “The aim isn’t to show suffering. A lot of the survivors have asked me for no sad pictures. They don’t want to be portrayed with sadness. This is a project about living memory. I am really trying to shine a light on this amazing generation, to portray their personalities and their life stories.”
