Earthquake Refugees, Zante, Greece

Date

1953

Creator

Dawid Szymin was the son of Warsaw’s leading publisher of Hebrew and Yiddish books. When he was a student in Paris he began taking photographs for French illustrated magazines and newspapers. He stamped his prints CHIM, a phonetic abbreviation of his surname easily pronounced in French. In 1939, he was working in New York when Germany invaded Poland. During the war he served in the United States Army, became an American citizen, and changed his name to David Seymour, unaware that his family perished in the Holocaust. Chim was photographing the queen consort of Greece in 1953, when an earthquake struck the southern Ionian Islands, and he rushed to the epicenter. Instead of documenting a grand disaster, Chim typically concentrated on modest human stories. This photograph represents a young mother sheltered in a refugee tent with her sleeping toddler, an infant curls in her lap, as she communicates her experiences in a letter. from Touchstones of the Twentieth Century: A History of Photography at the University of Notre Dame (exhibition, 2020-21)