Word: nazis
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Rutka Laskier lived in Bedzin, Poland, with her parents, grandmother and brother. Her journal, covering four months in 1943, provides a rare glimpse of the daily life of Jews under Nazi rule. The diary was found after World War II by a friend--who kept it to herself for 60 years before allowing it to be published, initially in Polish, in 2006. A selection of entries...
...1940s show Paris as sunny, airy, bursting with color. Its inhabitants appear carefree, content and refreshingly unaware of their proclivity for looking très chic. It's all very much at odds with the prevailing image of the French capital suffering and smoldering under the yoke of its Nazi occupiers. Indeed, that very dissonance has made the current photo exhibit "Parisians Under the Occupation" one of the city's most controversial cultural events of late. Was life in Nazi-controlled Paris really as idyllic as these pictures suggest...
...strong turnout of 11,000 visitors since it opened on March 20. But in recent days the exhibit's 250 photographs have become the subject of a heated debate over how history ought to be presented. Detractors claim the curators neglected to inform spectators that the pictures were outright Nazi propaganda, commissioned and shot to show a German public just how happily the French lived under Occupation. That contextual omission, critics contend, not only allows the photos to broadcast a deceptive view of Nazi rule more than 60 years after they were shot; it also insults the memory of Holocaust...
...time Delanoë made that call, the curators had moved to provide that context. Visitors to the Historic Library are now informed in several languages that the pictures were shot by André Zucca, a Frenchman hired by the German magazine Signal to capture scenes of Paris flourishing under Nazi rule. Zucca's bosses' gave him extremely rare and valuable rolls of Agfacolor film to shoot his busy shoppers, café-lounging lovers, parks filled with parents and playing children, and ultra-chic Parisiennes sporting the last word in fashionably enormous eyewear...
...make the case for their display. Indeed, even Girard noted that "had it been clearly explained to the public that these were propaganda photos on display, the exhibit could have been very interesting." While most photos clearly present an idealized and flattering picture of occupied Paris, other shots featuring Nazi flags, German installations, and huge numbers of uniformed soldiers mingling on familiar Parisian streets leave little doubt as to the actual context...