On September 13, 1939, a car drove past a small field on the edge of Warsaw. The American in it arrived a few minutes too late.

What he was told afterward went like this. Seven women had been digging potatoes. There was no flour left in their district, and without the potatoes they had nothing to eat. Two German planes appeared out of nowhere and dropped two bombs on a small house two hundred yards away, killing the two women inside. The diggers lay flat on the ground, hoping not to be seen. When the planes had gone, they got up and went back to work.

A few minutes later the planes came back. This time they dropped to two hundred feet and raked the whole field with machine-gun fire. Two of the seven women were killed.

The American got out of the car and raised his camera to the bodies. Just then a little girl came running up, stopped beside one of the dead, and did not move.

It was her sister.

The American was Julien Bryan. The girl was Kazimiera Kostewicz. Her sister, Anna, was fourteen.

I. The Last Train

Bryan was forty that year, from Titusville, Pennsylvania, a Princeton graduate. In 1917 he had driven an ambulance at the front in France. Since then he had made his living by taking photographs, shooting films and touring the country with illustrated lectures. He had been to the Soviet Union, and in 1937 he had filmed Nazi Germany. In the summer of 1939 he was in Holland, filming farm life.

On September 3 his train stopped at the border between Romania and Poland, and only then did he learn that Germany had invaded Poland two days before. Why he did not turn back at that moment, he wrote later, he did not know.

The train crept on through the air raids. Before dawn on September 7 he stepped off in Warsaw. As he put it in his film, it was the seventh day of the war, and a third of the city was already in ruins.

The American ambassador, Anthony Biddle, had been gone for two days. The consul general, John K. Davis, later reported that on September 5 the ambassador and his whole staff had hurriedly left for a point near Lublin, leaving behind only the military attaché, a second secretary and a few Polish employees; the next day those two Americans were called away as well. On September 6 the Polish Foreign Office telephoned the missions to say that the government could no longer protect diplomats and that they should leave Warsaw.

The government had gone, and the foreign correspondents had gone with it. Left in the city were a few officers of the consulate general, a crowd of refugees in the embassy cellars, and the photographer who had just got off the train.

II. The Mayor's Permit

A foreigner carrying a movie camera through a besieged city could be taken for a spy at any moment.

Bryan went to the mayor of Warsaw, Stefan Starzyński. The mayor gave him a car, a guide who also served as interpreter, and a permit to photograph whatever he liked.

He had a Leica and a Bell & Howell movie camera. In his bags were rolls of Kodak color film he had brought along to try out. Many years later Poland's Institute of National Remembrance would call his pictures the only color photographs of the September siege taken by a sympathetic observer; the other well-known color pictures were made by German propaganda units.

The permit did not always help. On September 9 he was arrested in the street as a German spy and let go only when it was clear he was an American citizen. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a photograph from those days: in the middle of a watching crowd, his interpreter is explaining to a policeman that the man in the turned-up fedora is an American photographer, not a German spy.

III. Four Days Old

The city's largest maternity hospital was bombed.

When Bryan got there, the hospital had been hit five times the day before. He followed the doctors and nurses as they came back to inspect the damage. The beds had held civilians wounded in earlier raids.

The head nurse told him she had been on duty for seven days and seven nights. Once the siege began the hospital had taken in other patients, so it was badly crowded. When the bombs fell there were more than fifty mothers in the building with babies only a few days old. Most of the mothers were carried down to the cellars, where they sat on the cold, damp tile floor with their infants on their laps.

In the film he gave one of the babies a single line: four days old, and already a casualty of war.

The footage nearly did not survive. He took his film to a Kodak laboratory in the city for developing. In the film he says the pictures had been in the developing tank, and he had moved them across the room to a dryer half an hour before the bomb struck. Among the Holocaust Memorial Museum's photographs is one of that bomb-damaged laboratory.

IV. Flags on the Roof

By September 12, Bryan was sheltering in the American embassy with a crowd of other Americans.

That day the radio said the German army was entering the city. Out came every American flag the embassy could find. The largest, ten feet by fifteen, was carried to the roof. Others were hung at the front of the building and at the back as well, in case the Germans came from that direction. The last, a small one, was spread over the dugout in the garden.

"But the Germans did not come that day," Bryan wrote, "nor did they come while we were in Warsaw."

Davis's report gives the other side. Two large American flags had already been painted on the roof. There were as many as nine air raids a day, some by sixty or seventy planes, yet only one bomb fell close to the building, and it did not explode. From about September 9 the worse ordeal was field artillery; several shells burst inside the consulate general. "For all practical purposes," Davis wrote, "we found ourselves living in the midst of a battlefield."

No one knew whether any of their telegrams had got through. Nothing on the radio from London, Paris, Berlin or the United States suggested that anyone had heard them. They were, Davis wrote, a "lost battalion."

V. The Potato Field

The next day came the potato field.

Bryan later wrote of the girl that she had never seen death before and could not understand why her sister would not speak to her. She looked at them 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."

The Holocaust Memorial Museum keeps the series. Some frames show her beside her sister's body; some show Bryan himself with his arm around her. In another, a Polish man wearing an armband, also holding a camera, leads her away from her sister.

In his book Bryan calls her ten years old. Later Polish accounts say she was twelve, two years younger than her sister.

The field lay behind the wall of the Powązki Cemetery, near Ostroroga Street.

VI. Speaking to America

On the evening of September 16, Bryan spoke in English over Warsaw radio.

"President Roosevelt and the people of America! I speak from the besieged city of Warsaw, Poland. My name is Bryan, Julien Bryan, American photographer." His job that day, he said, was to tell a simple story of what he had seen with his own eyes in the last ten days. "America must act. It must demand the most dreadful slaughter of modern times be stopped."

The next day a Warsaw newspaper reported the broadcast. He was asking Americans, it said, to help not the small group of Americans left in the city, but the brave Polish people.

The appeal was not broadcast in the United States.

VII. An Afternoon's Truce

In the end the besieged got a truce.

At three in the afternoon of September 16, German planes dropped leaflets over the city: civilians could leave by two named roads, and after twenty-four hours the city would be subjected to intense and unrestricted bombing. The diplomats still in Warsaw asked the Polish commander to request a truce from the German army so that foreign officials and citizens could get out. The exchanges went on for days.

On the afternoon of September 21 the truce came. The consulate was given definite word less than an hour before the evacuation began. Americans were scattered all over the city, most of them Polish-Americans. Three telephone lines were kept busy, and the last Polish radio station read the notice again and again. Those not living at the embassy were told to go to the Hotel Bristol, where Polish army trucks were waiting. To get as many people out as possible, each person was allowed one small bag or suitcase.

As they left, German planes were still overhead and firing went on in every direction except the one the evacuation was taking. One of the first cars out was hit by shell fragments.

In the confusion Bryan was separated from the suitcase that held his film. He thought it was lost.

Past the lines, those in trucks were moved to German trucks and then to special trains; those in cars formed a convoy escorted by German officers. Both groups went to Königsberg in East Prussia. A German newspaper reported that some 170 members of foreign missions and about 1,200 other foreigners arrived there.

The suitcase came back to him. While he waited in East Prussia for the Germans to decide what to do with him, Bryan hid the film in the filter canister of a gas mask. The mask belonged to a fellow American, who was taking it home as a souvenir.

VIII. Warsaw on the Screen

Bryan went home by way of Sweden and Norway. Six weeks later, in New York, he got his film back.

On October 23, 1939, Life published his pictures under the title "Documentary Record of the Last Days of Once Proud Warsaw," fifteen of them in all. Look printed twenty-six more, among them a boy holding a birdcage.

In 1940 he published a book called Siege and cut the footage into a ten-minute film of the same name, released to theaters by RKO. It was the first footage of the war's opening not produced by the Nazis to be shown in American theaters. In 1941 it was nominated for an Academy Award for best one-reel short.

At the start of the film he says that the government had fled, and the foreign correspondents with it, and "these were the only pictures made in the city during the siege."

But the potato field in the film is not the one in his book. The film places the scene "on the 21st day, and I was leaving that city of sorrow," and says seven women had been machine-gunned from the air while a stunned child waited beside a mother's body. The book gives September 13, two dead out of seven, and the dead woman is the girl's sister.

Near the end of the film he says that the people on the outskirts, when they learned he was an American photographer, seemed to believe he had come all the way from the United States to help them. "But I could do no more than capture the record written in their faces."

Epilogue

A week after Bryan left, Warsaw surrendered.

On October 27 the Gestapo took Starzyński from the city hall. He was held first in the prison on Daniłowiczowska Street, then in Pawiak. On December 22 or 23 he was taken from the prison, and nothing more was heard of him. In 2014 Poland's Institute of National Remembrance closed its investigation, concluding that he was shot in or near Warsaw between December 21 and 23, 1939.

In 1958 Bryan went back to Warsaw to look for the people in his pictures. He found twenty-five of them.

The boy with the birdcage was Zygmunt Aksienow. When Bryan reprinted the pictures in a local paper, he recognized himself. He had been nine. The cage had been blown out of a building together with a window, and the canary inside was still alive. "I was a scared 9-year-old," he said late in life, "out looking for some sign of the normal life I was used to."

Kazimiera was found too. By then she had married and taken the name Mika, and she was thirty-one. She still remembered the American's light gray suit, and the way he had comforted her.

Bryan died in 1974, two months after receiving a medal from the Polish government. In 2003 his son, Sam, transferred his films and photographs of Poland and Nazi Germany to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Kazimiera Mika died on August 28, 2020, at ninety-three. She had outlived her sister by eighty-one years.

A year later, on September 30, 2021, a plaque went up on a building not far from the potato field. It honors Anna Kostewicz, and the American who raised his camera, and then put it down.

Sources and editorial boundaries 1. Bryan's own words and voice: Bryan's passages on the potato field, the flags at the embassy and the boy with the canary follow the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum photo archive, which quotes Julien Bryan, Warsaw: 1939 Siege; 1959 Warsaw Revisited (Warsaw: Polonia, 1959, a reprint of Siege with his 1958 revisit, pp. 20–21, 24, 31); records read: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1154423 , https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1154425 , https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1154493 , https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa9178 . The original Siege (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1940) is scanned at the Internet Archive but lending-only and was not read in full. The narration of the film Siege (RKO, 1940) follows the copy at the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/34444SiegePoland (about 10 min 10 s), transcribed by the editor with speech recognition and checked against context; it was not compared with the earliest, most complete print found by the USHMM in 2007. The radio talk of September 16 follows the text quoted by the Pilecki Institute together with Dobry Wieczór! Kurier Czerwony of September 17, 1939: https://instytutpileckiego.pl/en/medal/odznaczeni/julien-bryan . His "did not turn around" remark, the stop at the border on September 3, the arrival before dawn on September 7, the Leica and Bell & Howell cameras, the arrest as a spy on September 9 (photo caption), the fifteen pictures in Life and twenty-six in Look, Aksienow's recollections, and the Polish medal two months before Bryan's death in 1974 follow Mike Edwards, "Capturing Warsaw at the Dawn of World War II," Smithsonian, November 2010: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/capturing-warsaw-at-the-dawn-of-world-war-ii-63976601/ . 2. American diplomatic records: Consul General John K. Davis, despatch No. 1 from Oslo to the Secretary of State, October 3, 1939 (the ambassador's departure on September 5; the Polish Foreign Office's call of September 6), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1939, vol. II, doc. 637: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1939v02/d637 ; Davis's report on the consulate general during the siege (flags on the roof, the number of raids, shelling from about September 9, "living in the midst of a battlefield," "lost battalion," the leaflets of September 16, the evacuation of September 21, the Hotel Bristol, one small bag each, the car hit by fragments, trucks to special trains and the car convoy to Königsberg, 1,000 to 1,200 people), English text as published by David A. Langbart: https://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2018/04/we-found-ourselves-living-in-the-midst-of-a-battlefield/ , checked against Ryszard Żelichowski's annotated Polish edition (Facta Simonidis 18, 2025, no. 2, pp. 245–263, full PDF read): https://doi.org/10.56583/fs.2870 . "About 170 members of foreign missions and about 1,200 other foreigners" comes from the Zobtener Zeitung of September 25, 1939, cited in note 49 of that article. 3. Institutional sources: USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, "Julien Bryan" (the mayor's car, guide, interpreter and permit; in the city September 7–21; separated from his film; the gas mask in East Prussia; film recovered in New York six weeks later; return by way of Sweden and Norway; acquisition in 2003): https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/julien-bryan ; "Siege (1940)" (RKO release, first non-Nazi footage of the war's start in US theaters, 1941 Academy Award nomination, National Film Registry 2006, earliest print found 2007): https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/siege-1940 ; collection record and finding aid (Life, October 23, 1939; Look, December 5, 1939; the 1958 revisit locating twenty-five people; the 1959 book): https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn546109 , https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20100303-julien-bryan-collection-finding-aid.pdf ; photo records: the interpreter and the policeman https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1155105 , the bombed Kodak laboratory https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1169745 , the bombed maternity ward of the Catholic Hospital of the Transfiguration https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1168695 . Institute of National Remembrance (IPN): Bryan's photographs (Kodak color film; the only color photographs by a "benevolent observer") https://eng.ipn.gov.pl/en/news/4559,The-Siege-of-Warsaw-in-Julien-Bryan039s-photographs.html ; obituary of Kazimiera Mika (Anna aged fourteen; died August 28, 2020, aged ninety-three; outlived her sister by eighty-one years; remembered his light suit) https://eng.ipn.gov.pl/en/news/4562,Kazimiera-Mika-ne-Kostewicz-dies-at-93.html ; conclusion of the 2014 investigation into Starzyński's death https://ipn.gov.pl/pl/dla-mediow/komunikaty/11943,Zakonczenie-sledztwa-w-sprawie-zabojstwa-Prezydenta-m-st-Warszawy-Stefana-Starzy.html . Polska Zbrojna (Polish Ministry of Defence), September 30, 2021 (September 13; Ostroroga Street and the Powązki Cemetery wall; the sisters' ages; Kazimiera thirty-one in 1958; the light gray suit; the plaque on the Military Gendarmerie building; the last train): https://www.polska-zbrojna.pl/home/articleshow/35434 . Dates of birth and death follow Wikidata: Bryan, Q959506 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q959506 ; Starzyński's birth, Q3849484 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3849484 . 4. Secondary accounts used only for cross-checking: Peter Zablocki, "Warsaw Witness," Warfare History Network, Winter 2026 (a retelling of Bryan's 1940 book, with several points that do not match the original records): https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/julien-bryan-photographer-warsaw-invasion-poland/ ; the blog Warszawska identyfikacja on the location of the field: http://warsawid.blogspot.com/2013/04/kartoflisko.html . 5. Boundaries: Kazimiera's age is ten in Bryan's book and in the USHMM captions; the IPN and Polska Zbrojna give twelve, two years younger than her fourteen-year-old sister, which fits her age of thirty-one in 1958 and ninety-three at her death in 2020; the text gives both. Date and details of the potato field: the photo archive gives September 13, 1939, and the book says two of seven were killed and the dead woman was the girl's sister; the film narration places the scene on "the 21st day" as he was leaving and speaks of seven women machine-gunned and a child beside a "mother's body"; the text reports both without reconciling them. The narration was transcribed by speech recognition and individual words may be wrong; the line the USHMM quotes from the film ("Somehow it seemed brutal to intrude upon the privacy of these terror-stricken people") does not appear in the Internet Archive copy, so the versions differ, and the text does not use it. The radio talk is dated the evening of September 16 by the Pilecki Institute and the next day's newspaper, September 15 by Zablocki; the text uses the 16th. The number of Americans he mentioned is forty-five in the newspaper headline and forty-two in the Pilecki Institute's English rendering; the text gives no number. Why the talk was not heard in the United States is not reliably documented and is not explained. The interpreter-driver is named Stephan Radlinski in a Smithsonian caption and Thaddeus Pawlowski by Zablocki; the text names neither. Bryan's hotel is the Bristol in Żelichowski and the Europejski in Zablocki; it is not named. No primary source was found for the day he moved into the embassy; the text says only that he was there by September 12. The quantity of film and photographs varies: "a few hours of film, hundreds of photographs" (IPN), "6 hours of footage and 700 photographs" (Pilecki Institute), "hundreds of still negatives and more than 5,000 feet of motion picture film" (Smithsonian), "6,000 feet of 16mm film and 500 images" (Zablocki); the text gives no figure. How the film got out follows the USHMM (the gas-mask canister, recovered in New York six weeks later); the Smithsonian adds that he gave some film to companions and "by one account" wound developed film around his torso, and Zablocki has a teenage girl carry the mask; these are not used. The route home follows the USHMM, by way of Sweden and Norway; Zablocki's Lithuania, Latvia (Riga), flight to Stockholm and ship from Oslo has no primary support here and is left out. The September 9 arrest rests only on a Smithsonian caption. "The last train" follows Polska Zbrojna ("arrived by the last train"); Bryan's own words were not seen. The maternity hospital is identified as the Catholic Hospital of the Transfiguration in USHMM photo records; the date of the visit is not fixed and the text gives none. Starzyński's arrest is October 27 in the IPN's 2014 conclusion and October 26 in an IPN biographical note, which also suggests Palmiry; Wikidata also lists death at Dachau in 1943, which the 2014 investigation rejected; the text follows 2014. The twenty-six pictures in Look follow the Smithsonian; the issue was not seen and no date is given in the text; the fifteen in Life appear in the issue of October 23, 1939, from p. 73, which was not read. The map point for the field uses 35 Ostroroga Street (today a Military Gendarmerie building) and marks the vicinity only. No invented dialogue, inner thoughts or sensory embellishment; quoted words come from the sources listed, and Polish material is translated by the editor. 6. Key original wording: Bryan's book "Seven women had been digging potatoes in a field. There was no flour in their district, and they were desperate for food." "Two of the seven women were killed. The other five escaped somehow." "The child had never before seen death and couldn't understand why her sister would not speak to her..." "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..."; flags "But the Germans did not come that day, nor did they come while we were in Warsaw."; the canary "A boy was walking dazedly back and forth carrying the one possession he had found -- a canary in its cage."; the border "Why, at this moment, I did not turn around...I do not know"; film narration "I arrived in Warsaw the seventh day of the war to find a third of the city already a shambles." "these were the only pictures made in the city during the siege" "Four days old, and already a casualty of war." "This story almost missed being told." "It was the 21st day, and I was leaving that city of sorrow." "Seven women had been machine gunned from the air while digging potatoes. Beside one mother's body, a stunned child waited for what might happen next." "But I could do no more than capture the record written in their faces, dazed, angry, magnificent."; radio talk "President Roosevelt and the people of America! I speak from the besieged city of Warsaw, Poland. My name is Bryan – Julien Bryan, American photographer." "My job today is to tell a simple story of what I have seen with my own eyes during these last ten days." "America must act. It must demand the most dreadful slaughter of modern times be stopped."; Dobry Wieczór! Kurier Czerwony "Ameryko! Nie wzywam pomocy dla 45 Amerykanów, ale dla bohaterskiego narodu polskiego"; Davis "for all practical purposes we found ourselves living in the midst of a battlefield" "lost battalion" "each person would only be permitted to take out one small bag or suitcase"; Life "Documentary Record of the Last Days of Once Proud Warsaw"; Aksienow "I was a scared 9-year-old, out looking for some sign of the normal life I was used to."; Polska Zbrojna "jasnoszary garnitur"; IPN 2014 "do zabójstwa przez rozstrzelanie Prezydenta m.st. Warszawy Stefana Starzyńskiego doszło w okresie pomiędzy 21 a 23 grudnia 1939 r. w Warszawie lub w jej okolicach". 7. Rights: US government records (FRUS, consular reports) are in the public domain; Bryan's 1940 film and book, the 1959 reprint, museum pages, news reports and research articles are used for facts and brief quotation only; no photographs are reproduced; the narrative is original.