POLAND. 1948. Tereska, a child in a residence for disturbed children. She drew a picture of 'home' on the blackboard.David Seymour/MAGNUM Photos
A six-year-old orphan girl, her eyes haunted by what she’s experienced, scribbles an image of her home on a blackboard. This photograph of Tereska, which appeared in Life magazine in 1948, by celebrated photographer David (Chim) Seymour is currently part of an exhibit at the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, UNICEF sent Chim, a Polish-American photographer and one of the founding members of Magnum Photos, to photograph children who had lived through the war.
This was Chim’s first return to Poland. He was born David Szymin in Warsaw in 1911. He and his sister had escaped the Holocaust, but their parents had not. There were more than three million Polish Jews before the war; most of them had now been murdered, Warsaw had been flattened, and there was no trace of the Szymin home.
Chim travelled from Warsaw to Otwock, where his family had owned a boarding house before the war. The building had been turned into an orphanage, Dom Dziecka, for Jewish children. He too had once played there as a child.
It was at another orphanage that he photographed Tereska. In time this powerful image would inspire a book, Tereska and her Photographer, and lead to the creation of the Tereska Foundation, which does philanthropic work.
Eventually Chim’s photographs from that visit were published in a book, Children of Europe, in 1949. It is those photographs that form the spine of the Image Centre exhibit, along with the captions he wrote.
While he never wrote of his state of mind during that trip, we do get a clue to what he was feeling in the introductory text to the book, where he writes: “I am not writing to you today out of resentment, although I could easily detest you – indeed I have done so more than once.”
He was not alone in his silence. The Holocaust was too close and raw for many victims to process, so it is to his work that we look. As his UNICEF work showed, Chim had a great affinity for children, although he never had any of his own.
At times, to see the world as children did, he would get down to their level, giving his photographs a beguiling, gentle intimacy.
A beautiful example of this is his photograph of a child being given her first pair of shoes. Chim wrote his own caption for the picture: “For a long time four-year-old Elefteria just stared at the new shoes. Finally, her grandmother was allowed to put them on her feet. Then the ice was broken. Elefteria ran through the village, laughing with delight. Her happiness was absolutely perfect.”
GREECE. Oxia. 1947. Elefteria, the only child not evacuated from her remote village during the ravages of the civil war there, receives her first pair of shoes from UNICEF.David Seymour/MAGNUM Photos
The year before taking up his UNICEF project, Chim and several colleagues, including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, founded the photo co-operative Magnum. In the last nine years of his life, Chim continued photographing while working tirelessly to establish and expand Magnum.
Capa’s untimely death in 1954 while covering the war in Indochina came as a blow to Chim, personally and professionally. The older Chim had been mentor and teacher to Capa, and their brotherly relationship also had a caring fatherly aspect to it.
The two had shared much during tumultuous times. Both had fled Europe, anglicized their Jewish names and fashioned new identities and careers. They were driven by a passion to change the relationship between photographers and photo agencies, which is what Magnum achieved.
Along the way, both had also acquired a taste for fine living. They wore Brooks Brothers grey suits, silk shirts made to measure in Rome and mainly black ties. Chim once told a younger photographer, “You don’t go to see an editor dressed like a plumber!”
Behind the debonair persona, however, could be found a different set of emotions. Writing to his sister Eileen, Chim confided, “My life was always broken in pieces and kind of disjointed due to circumstances, and I am trying hard to make sense of it.” To Eileen, her brother “was basically an unhappy man, torn in himself and lonely despite the glamour of his career and the many friends he made wherever his assignments took him.” Cartier-Bresson was also attuned to this, observing perceptively that “Chim was not the same after the war.”
When the Hungarian uprising broke out in 1956, he did not have the emotional strength to cover it. As he divulged to a girlfriend, Judy Friedberg, “I should go but can’t bring myself to do it yet. … [I am] not yet ready to go back.”
The Holocaust casts a long shadow, and Chim’s avoidance had a heartbreaking denouement. He chose to cover the Suez Crisis instead. Four days after the armistice, this gentle, cultured man, imbued with a rare photographic gift and buffeted by his generation’s ghosts, was killed when the car he was travelling in was fired upon by Egyptian soldiers.
Children of Europe is at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University until Dec. 13, 2025. It will return Jan. 14, 2025 and will run to April 4.