(photo credit: jacobin.com)
My forthcoming book, Dark Shadows Hover, will be released on January 26 to coincide with events surrounding International Holocaust Remembrance Day, annually recognized on January 27. I'm honored thatAmsterdam Publishers in the Netherlands, which specializes in Holocaust memoir and some fiction, is the book's publisher.
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This weekly series of blog posts will introduce the reader to some basic history before reading my book, a biographical fiction based on the young life of Moris Albahari, who at the age of twelve became a Yugoslav Partisan. Though it’s not critical to read the posts to enjoy the book, I trust you’ll find them interesting. If you’d like to receive subsequent blog posts leading up to book publication, and are not already on my email list, subscribe at jordanstevensher.com.
The Nazis, their Collaborators, and Tito’s Partisans in World War II Yugoslavia
Part 9: Photography and the Partisans
At the age of twelve, Moris Albahari, the real-life protagonist in my new book, was given a camera in the Partisans to document their journey. Never having taken a picture, no less having owned a camera, his work is an important part of his story. Below is background that will elucidate the enormous responsibility Moris was given, and and how photography predated social media platforms that are so dominant in today’s world—for both good and bad.
Photography was one of the most powerful tools for the Partisans to spread images of their struggle to liberate Yugoslavia from its occupiers. Most were not professional photographers, but ordinary people in the movement trained, and then tasked to take pictures that would inspire the civilians to support the Partisans, and to join them in the fight. After all, growing from small localized guerrilla units to an army of 600,000 was predicated on messaging that the liberators conveyed to the masses.
“The people’s liberation struggle fought not only against the German and Italian occupation, but also the domestic traitors and collaborators, the Ustasha and the Chetniks. This was, at the same time, a fight for social revolution, the democratization of the economy, and the complete emancipation of a semifeudal and largely illiterate society.” (Davor Konjikusic)
So, if a majority of the population had no formal education being that this was an agrarian society, the written word would be inconsequential. Therefore, pictures were the answer.
The Partisans couldn’t compete with the highly sophisticated German war propaganda machine. But the Partisans used their photography to hang on bulletin boards of villages large and small, and display in newspapers, and photo albums. It was used to falsify documents, in Partisan archives, and exhibitions held in villages and cities, and even forests in liberated territory.
Certainly, the photographs portrayed the Partisan bravery from the groups like the Anti-fascist Women’s Movement to those in the trenches who fought for the liberation. This was not just a means of propaganda to agitate the people against the fascist invaders and their collaborators, but to set a tone for how a social culture could emerge in a communist society post-war. Later in the war, there was a concerted effort to formalize the propaganda production aspect of photography. Prior, it was in the hands of the individual photographers, and their negatives rolls of film until they could get them to a town or headquarters to develop them for propaganda purposes.
The photographer had to be careful not to get caught. They didn’t want to have their work destroyed, and usually worse, for them to be killed. If a photographer’s negatives were taken from them, the enemy could use their pictures to counter the narrative that the Partisans wished to portray.
Most photographs did not have their names connected to their work. The photographs were property of the revolution. No credit was to be given. Per Konjikusic, “In the fight against fascism, most photographers followed a common idea and motivation, undertaking collective action in pursuit of a clear and shared goal. These photographs tell the story of a victorious fight against a much stronger enemy, achieving the ideal of brotherhood and unity and lasting peace.”
(Information attributed to multiple sources and to a jacobin.com article, 7/6/2020 by Davor Konjukusic, author of Red Light)
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