Overview of the Bernard Gotfryd papers
Processed by Hoover Institution Archives Staff.
Hoover Institution Archives
© 2008
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305-6010
Phone: (650) 723-3563
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Hoover Institution Archives. All rights reserved.
Overview of the Bernard Gotfryd papers
Hoover Institution ArchivesStanford University
Stanford, California
- Processed by:
- Hoover Institution Archives Staff
- Date Completed:
- 2008
- Encoded by:
- Machine-readable finding aid created derived from MARC record by David Sun.
© 2008 Hoover Institution Archives. All rights reserved.
Title: Bernard Gotfryd papers
Dates: 1945-2006
Collection Number: 2008C24
Creator: Gotfryd, Bernard, 1924-
Collection Size:
8 manuscript boxes
(3.2 linear feet)
Repository:
Hoover Institution Archives
Stanford, California 94305-6010
Abstract: Correspondence, personal documents, printed matter, and photographs, relating to miscellaneous aspects of world politics.
Physical Location: Hoover Institution Archives
Languages:
English
Collection is open for research.
The Hoover Institution Archives only allows access to
copies of audiovisual items. To listen to sound recordings or to view videos or films during your visit, please contact the Archives
at least two working days before your arrival. We will then advise you of the accessibility of the material you wish to see
or hear. Please note that not all audiovisual material is immediately accessible.
For copyright status, please contact the Hoover Institution Archives.
[Identification of item], Bernard Gotfryd papers, [Box number], Hoover Institution Archives.
Acquired by the Hoover Institution Archives in 2008.
Materials may have been added to the collection since this finding aid was prepared. To determine if this has occurred, find
the collection in Stanford University's online catalog Socrates at
http://library.stanford.edu/webcat . Materials have been added to the collection if the number of boxes listed in Socrates is larger than the number of boxes
listed in this finding aid.
Bernard Gotfryd was a Holocaust survivor and celebrated staff photographer for
Newsweek for more than three decades until his retirement in the late 1980s.
Bernard Gotfryd was born in 1924, in Radom, Poland, to Jewish parents. During World War II, he worked as an apprentice photographer
at a photo studio in the Radom ghetto. His involvement with the Polish underground led to his imprisonment in a concentration
camp. He spent time in six concentration camps before his liberation from Gusen II in May 1945. Two years later he immigrated
to the United States. After several years of service with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, in 1957 Gotfryd became a photojournalist
for
Newsweek. During his thirty years with the magazine, he took portraits of many of the most influential and important people of the
day--statesmen, politicians, writers, musicians, painters--as well as those of many other, less prominent individuals, managing
"to capture the character, the physical nature, and sometimes even the soul of his subjects" (
Intimate Eye: Portraits by Bernard Gotfryd, New York: Riverside Book Company, 2006, p. 7).
After his retirement Gotfryd turned to writing and lecturing. His extraordinary wartime reminiscences were published as some
thirty autobiographical short stories under the title
Anton the Dove Fancier. He has also been active in lecturing about the Holocaust, particularly to high school students in the New York City area.
Several hundred letters from grateful listeners, included in his papers, bear witness to the effectiveness of his presentations.
Scope and Content of Collection
The collection consists of correspondence, personal documents, printed matter, and hundreds of photographs, both prints and
negatives. Other collections of Bernard Gotfryd photographs are held by the Library of Congress and the New York Historical
Society.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.
World politics--Pictorial works