Biographical Note
Born to Jewish parents in Radom, Poland in 1924, Bernard Gotfryd began his photography career after the outbreak of World War II as a photography apprentice at a local studio. During his apprenticeship Gotfryd began aiding the Polish resistance, providing them with Nazi photos of war atrocities, which resulted in his capture in 1943. He would endure imprisonments in multiple concentration camps before being liberated in 1945. Several years later, he immigrated to the United States and soon after was drafted into the U.S. Army with an assignment to the Signal Corps., where he served as a combat photographer. He became a photojournalist for Newsweek in 1957 and spent the next thirty years covering stories about prominent people in the arts, letters, and politics as well as national and international events. Gotfryd died in 2016.