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The following is excerpted from Bearing Witness: Perspectives on War and Peace from the Arts and Humanities edited by Sherrill Grace, Patrick Imbert and Tiffany Johnstone.
Almost every
exhibition devoted to the Hunger Winter features Emmy Andriesse’s photograph Boy with a Pan. It has been reprinted in books, magazines,
and newspapers around the world, and appears regularly in the Dutch media on
lustrum anniversary commemorations of the end of the Second World War. In the catalogue for the exhibition Foto ’48 at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Piet Zwart
declared: “If the only image we had of the period 44–45 were that heart-rending little lad holding a
pan in front of his tummy that Emmy Andriesse recorded, it would depict a
period of social suffering in a way that was legible for everyone of every era.” Sem Presser, a Jewish photographer stationed in Arnhem who became
the first official photographer working for the Allied Forces, reported seeing Boy with a Pan on a notice board at one of the Canadian
troop headquarters. War correspondents like Presser knew what to
do with such a powerful and moving photograph, the image of a starving
population. Together with other photographs by the Underground Photographers, Boy with a Pan found its way out of the country.The Emmy Andriesse
archive contains several prints of the photograph, some in better condition
than others, some displaying more of the street in the background than others.
In all of them, however, the compelling focus is this little boy; his thin
wrists and legs attest to his state of starvation; indeed, his head appears too
large for his small body. He holds the pot as if it is a shield to protect
himself, his hands gripping so tightly that they are almost claw-like. He
stands alone in the street, staring into the distance, light illuminating a
furrowed brow. His position slightly left of centre in the photograph
emphasizes the emptiness of the road ahead. A dent in the pan seems to reflect
the boy’s life even as it catches a glint of light. Who was the boy with a pan?
In May 1960, the fifteenth anniversary of the liberation, an anonymous
article in the Dutch magazine Margriet claimed
that the boy was Willem (Pim) van Schie, whose family lived in The Jordaan
neighbourhood of Amsterdam during the Hunger Winter (see “Weet u het nog?”). The then eighteen-year-old Pim could not
recollect being sent out to hunt for food, however, and his parents, like so
many of their generation, preferred not to talk about that period of their
lives. Thus the boy in Andriesse’s photograph remains anonymous, one among the
many children of Amsterdam who went hungry during the war, as do so many
children everywhere in the world in times of war.Click to view a Bearing Witness photoset
To learn more about Bearing Witness or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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