The Polish Institute is honored to support production of the short movie“You Have Courage, Madame”  by Asaf Galay devoted to a Polish-Jewish photographer Julia Pirotte. The film is based on Pirotte’s Yiddish testimony from the Fortunoff Archive at Yale University and follows two photographers, Avishag Shaar-Yashuv and Irene Pletka, as they trace her journey through Poland and France. The artists will embark on an inner and outer journey through Poland and the streets of Marseille, visiting the places Julia Pirotte lived and the sites she photographed, meeting people who knew her, and bringing a contemporary perspective to her unique legacy. 

The short movie about Julia Pirotte will be screened in the framework of the “20/20 – Her Own Lens” exhibition at ANU – Museum of the Jewish People.

The exhibition revisits that era to celebrate women’s creativity and to correct the injustice of their erasure from memory. It aims to give new life to the impressive works and groundbreaking photographers of the past by pairing them with twenty contemporary Jewish women photographers. This will be a unique opportunity to experience remarkable early photographic works alongside pieces by top international and Israeli photographers working today.

Between the two World Wars, for a brief and unique moment in art history, the world of photography in Europe was led by several talented Jewish women photographers. The war, which devastated the continent and the Jewish world, upended their lives and threw them under the wheels of history. Some, like Julia Pirotte, held a camera in one hand, concealed a gun in their pocket, and joined the resistance against the Nazis. Most fled overseas to survive and tried to piece their lives back together. After the war, that golden era came to an end: the world of photography returned to male dominance. The women photographers who had paved the way were largely forgotten.

The exhibition will be open to public from 4 June, 2025.

Address: ANU – Museum of the Jewish People, 15 Klausner Street, Tel Aviv–Yafo

Curators: Michal Huminer and Asaf Galay
Associate curator: Raaya Sapir.
Chief curator: Orit Shaham-Gover

Julia Pirotte (1908–2000) was a Polish-Jewish photographer and resistance fighter who became a symbol of courage, resilience, and profound humanism.

Pirotte was born in Końskowola near Lublin, Poland, and grew up in poverty and political struggle. At the age of 17, she was arrested for political activity and was forced to flee to Belgium, where she studied photography under harsh conditions. Her first camera was given to her by a non-Jewish woman she met along the way. With the outbreak of World War II, she worked as a photojournalist in the Baltic states and later escaped to France. She settled in Marseille and joined the French Resistance, hiding under the guise of a press photographer while simultaneously smuggling weapons and preparing forged documents for fighters.

During the war, Pirotte documented daily life under occupation alongside resistance activities, often at great personal risk. She would hide her film negatives to prevent her work from being discovered. After the war, she returned to Poland, where she documented the efforts of post-war reconstruction, the Kielce pogrom, and the International Peace Congress during which Pablo Picasso told her: “Madam, you have courage.”

Although her work was not widely recognized in post-war Poland, it received renewed international attention in the 1980s. Pirotte fought for the proper credit for her work, and today she is regarded as one of the leading photographers who documented the human face of resistance and life during wartime.

Pirotte’s photographic style is characterized by empathy and respect toward her subjects. For example, she refused to photograph French women being publicly humiliated after being accused of collaborating with the Nazis, believing it was wrong to exploit others’ suffering.

Pirotte’s legacy continues to inspire younger generations of photographers, such as Avishag Shaar-Yashuv and Irene Pletka, who followed her path in France and Poland.

Today, Julia Pirotte is remembered not only as a chronicler of war and survival but as a symbol of personal bravery, artistic integrity, and unwavering belief in humanity.