Page 26 - Narcyz Witczak - Witaczyński

Stanisław Zieliński. The most valuable part of those archives – his glass negatives with a record of pre-war reality were offered to the National Archives.
One late afternoon in January 2014, several dozen wooden boxes containing glass negatives were brought to the National Digital Archives. Some of these were still in the supplier’s original cartons ( ), in which glass negatives coated with light-sensitive emulsion were sold before World War II. Over 4,500 negatives, mainly on glass – Narcyz Witczak-Witaczyński’s photogra- phic achievements from over twenty years of work. There would have been even more photo- graphs. Most of those from the first years of World War II did not survive. But then again, the whole collection might well have perished, had not Narcyz Witczak-Witaczyński decided to take his photos from the Garwolin barracks, in which German soldiers came to be stationed. One of the barrack buildings housed Narcyz Witczak-Witaczyński’s studio and darkroom, and there too he kept all his negatives – packed in envelopes, sorted, numbered and with brief, concise descriptions, recorded in notebooks. Those notebooks also survived, so almost all of the photos are not only identified, but precisely dated.