Warsaw’s Jewish history museum on Wednesday presented a group of photographs taken in secret during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, some of which have never been seen before, that were recently discovered in a family collection.

The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews described the discovery of negatives with some 20 never-seen images as important discovery.

The photos were taken inside the Warsaw Ghetto by a Polish firefighter, Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski, as the Nazi Germans were brutally crushing the uprising of 1943. As the Germans burned down the ghetto, they called in Polish firefighters to keep the flames from engulfing nearby buildings outside the ghetto.

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The museum’s historians said that the value of Grzywaczewski’s pictures lies in their being the only known images from the ghetto uprising that were not taken by the German forces, and which therefore were not shot with the intention of serving Nazi propaganda.

Read more: AP