photo #9388246

19 years, a world war and a lot of water under the bridge between these two photos. 📷 13 September 1939, a group of women were picking potatoes on the outskirts of Warsaw, trying to ignore a man in a light-coloured suit who was photographing them. Occasionally, they looked up at the sky, but it was not a change of weather that they feared. In September 1939, skies over Warsaw held greater dangers than rain. 📷 One of them suddenly materialised in the form of Luftwaffe aircraft – and the women scattered, desperately running for cover. The German pilots dropped their bombs, destroying a nearby hut, and turned to fly away. Meanwhile, the photographer, thrown into a waiting car by a Polish Army officer escorting him, was being driven away. Then, he looked back. 📷 He saw the women scrambling to their feet, and a teenage girl running from the shattered building, where she’d found shelter. At that moment, one of the aircraft returned. The photographer watched in horror as the pilot opened fire, and saw bullets hitting the girl, as one last bomb exploded nearby. He yelled at the driver to stop, grabbed his camera and ran there. 📷 The 14-year-old was beyond help. Her younger sister was squatting by the prostrate body and weeping, shocked and unable to grasp the situation. The photographer snapped a few photos, capturing the youngster’s pain, and then tried to comfort the girl. The pictures he took that day became symbols of that grim September when civilians suffered no less than soldiers. 📷 The photographer was Julien Bryan, American journalist, the girl 12-year-old Kazia Kostewicz, who'd just lost her sister Andzia. "The child looked at us in bewilderment. I threw my arm about her and held her tightly, trying to comfort her. She cried. So did I and the two Polish officers who were with me. But what could we tell her? What could anyone tell that child?" Bryan recalled. 📷 In Warsaw, he took absolutely iconic photographs of September 1939, but the ones someone took of him comforting the girl in pain are equally powerful. In 1958, Bryan returned to Poland and found Kazia, by then married with two children. He held her like he had in 1939, and you can see that that shock had gone away, like it would. But the pain and comfort are still there.