George Kadish

Kadish was born in Raseiniai, Lithuania, in 1910, and later moved with his family to Kovno (Kaunas). Before World War II, he taught mathematics, science, and electronics at a Hebrew high school in Kovno. Kadish was an avid amateur photographer and built his own cameras.^[2]

During the period of Nazi control of Lithuania, he photographed various scenes of life and its difficulties in the ghetto in clandestine circumstances. Kadish constructed cameras by which he could photograph through the buttonhole of his coat or over a window sill. Because of his technical training, Kadish was assigned to the X-ray department of a German military hospital outside the ghetto, where he had access to photographic chemicals and was able to obtain film. To preserve the images, Kadish concealed photographic material in a modified crutch and later hid the negatives underground in milk cans.^[3]

With his selfmade camera and a hidden Leica, Kadish was able to photograph scenes that German and local authorities would have treated as dangerous evidence. His photographs include images of children, forced labor, deportations, underground schooling, the ghetto jail, and the destruction of the Kovno ghetto. Among the scenes he documented were prisoners behind a barred window in the ghetto jail, a member of the ghetto underground hiding supplies in a well, children working in ghetto workshops, Jews collecting potatoes, deportation actions, shoes left behind after a deportation, the burning and ruins of the ghetto during its liquidation, and the exhumation of a mass grave at the Ninth Fort after the liberation of Kovno.^[4][5][6]

In 1945, Kadish organized ''Pictures of the Ghetto'', a traveling exhibition based on his photographs from Kovno. It was shown in Landsberg, Feldafing, and Munich, where it reached displaced persons communities.^[7] Historian Rachel E. Perry later described it as one of the first exhibitions created by a Jewish survivor for Jewish survivors.^[1]

Kadish's photographs were later included in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibition ''Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto'' and in the travelling exhibition ''Light One Candle'', which premiered in 2001 and was later shown at the YIVO Institute in New York.^[8][9]

• Kadish, George, et al. Days of Remembrance, 1987: Family Life in the Kovno Ghetto. San Francisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press, 1991. The book is the catalog of Kadish' work, as displayed in 1987 at the Russell Senate Office Building.

• George's Kaddish for Kovno and the Six Million. Catherine Gong, edited by Michael Berenbaum. 2009. Also located at Stanford University (Cecil H. Green), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive, and Tom Lantos Foundation for Human Rights. See also, http://catherinegong.com/georges-kaddish-for-kovno-and-the-six-million/