Bernard Gotfryd Gives His Photographs and Papers to the Hoover Institution

August 12, 2008

The Hoover Institution Archives received the papers and the photographs of Bernard Gotfryd, Holocaust survivor and celebrated staff photographer for Newsweek for more than three decades until his retirement in the late 1980s.

Bernard Gotfryd was born in 1924, in Radom, Poland, to Jewish parents. During World War II, he worked as an apprentice photographer at a photo studio in the Radom ghetto. His involvement with the Polish underground led to his imprisonment in a concentration camp. He spent time in six concentration camps before his liberation from Gusen II in May 1945. Two years later he immigrated to the United States. After several years of service with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, in 1957 Gotfryd became a photojournalist for Newsweek. During his thirty years with the magazine, he took portraits of many of the most influential and important people of the day—statesmen, politicians, writers, musicians, painters—as well as those of many other, less prominent individuals, managing "to capture the character, the physical nature, and sometimes even the soul of his subjects" (Intimate Eye: Portraits by Bernard Gotfryd, New York: Riverside Book Company, 2006, p. 7).

After his retirement Gotfryd turned to writing and lecturing. His extraordinary wartime reminiscences were published as some thirty autobiographical short stories under the title Anton the Dove Fancier. He has also been active in lecturing about the Holocaust, particularly to high school students in the New York City area. Several hundred letters from grateful listeners, included in his papers, bear witness to the effectiveness of his presentations.

The collection consists of correspondence, personal documents, printed matter, and hundreds of photographs, both prints and negatives. Other collections of Bernard Gotfryd photographs are held by the Library of Congress and the New York Historical Society.