She smiles, her demeanour relaxed. In normal times, this young woman would surely have enjoyed a bright and happy future, perhaps with a husband, children, grandchildren.
But soon after this photograph was taken, she would face almost certain death. The haunting image is one of a series depicting Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland before they were rounded up to be sent to the gas chambers.
Despite the awfulness of her predicament, this Jewish woman manages to smile brightly for the camera as she poses for Jaeger
An elderly man with a yellow Star of David
fixed to his chest, speaks with German officers as he and other Jews are
rounded up in Kutno, German-occupied Poland in 1939
Innocent victims: These young Jewish girls
couldn't possibly have imagined the horrors that lay ahead as they pose
outside their tent in another haunting photograph taken by the ardent
Nazi Hugo Jaeger
The clue is the curled-up piece of yellow cloth the unknown woman wears on her lapel – a makeshift Star of David. All around her, and in other photos taken in the ghetto into which the Nazis corralled their prisoners, every man, woman and child was forced to wear one.
In peacetime, the six-pointed star was a proud symbol of Judaism. In the Holocaust which Hitler was about to unleash – here in the devastated town of Kutno – it would become their death-star.
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