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Julia Pirotte
Julia Pirotte
	Julia Pirotte, Autoportrait dans la glace (1943), Army Museum, Paris.
Born	Julia Diament; 1 January 1908 [citation needed]; Końskowola, Congress Poland
Died	25 July 2000 (aged 92); Warsaw, Poland
Resting place	Powązki Cemetery
Nationality	Polish
Occupation	Photojournalist
Era	20th century
Known for	Photography, War Photography, Resistance
Political party	Communist Party of Poland
Movement	Communism
Criminal charges	Political activity
Criminal penalty	4 years imprisonment
Spouses	Jean-Claude Pirotte; Jefim Sokolski;
Parents	Boruch Diament (father); Sura Szejnfeld (mother);
Military career
Allegiance	French Communist Party
Service / branch	Francs-Tireurs et Partisans
Years of service	1940-1944
Unit	FTP-MOI
Battles / wars	Liberation of France

Julia Pirotte (née Diament; 1908 – 25 July 2000) was a Polish photojournalist known for her work in Marseille during the Second World War when she documented the French Resistance, and for photographs taken in the aftermath of the Kielce Pogrom of 1946.^[1]^[2]

Biography

Early life

Born Julia Diament in Końskowola, a town in Congress Poland, she was one of three children - a sister, Mindla Maria Diament and a brother, Majer Diament. She and her siblings were self-taught due to their inability to attend school due to the then-political atmosphere. Diament and her sister were members of the Communist Party of Poland - hostile to the system of the new Polish state, which gained independence after 123 years of partition. She and her sister were persecuted due to their support for communism in Poland after Polish–Soviet War in 1919-1921.

Emigration

In 1925 she was imprisoned for communist activities. Threatened by another arrest, she emigrated to Belgium in 1934 where she married Jean Pirotte, a labor activist in Brussels, and studied photography.^[3] In May 1940, after the German occupation of Belgium and the deportation of her husband, Pirotte made her way to southern France, where she played an active role in Jewish and French resistance groups. Based in Marseille, she worked as a photojournalist for Dimanche Illustré and served as a courier for weapons, false papers and underground publications in a resistance group, the FTP-MOI. During this time she took numerous photographs documenting life under the Vichy Regime. As a member of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, she was able to photograph the activities of the Maquis resistance in the summer of 1944 and the liberation of Marseille.^[4]^[5]

After the war, Pirotte returned to Poland as a photojournalist for the Polish periodical Zolnierz Polski. During that period she covered the aftermath of the Kielce Pogrom of 4 July 1946^[6] and attended the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace of 1948 in Wrocław, taking portraits of Pablo Picasso, Irène Joliot-Curie and Dominique Desanti. Pirotte visited Israel in 1957. She later married Jefim Sokolski, a Polish economist who died in 1974.^{[citation needed]}

In later years, Pirotte frequently traveled to Belgium, France, and the United States, where, in 1984, the International Center of Photography in New York hosted an exhibition of her work.^[7]

After the war, she received decorations: The Croix de Guerre 1939–1945 which distinguishes individuals (civilian and military), units, cities or institutions that received a commendation for acts of war during the Second World War and the Order of Arts and Letters in February 1996, whose rewards "persons who have distinguished themselves by their creation in the artistic or literary field or by the contribution they have made to the influence of the arts and letters in France and in the world"

Pirotte's sister Mindla Maria Diament (1911 – 24 August 1944) was a member of the French Resistance, she was captured and tortured before being deported and executed in Breslau.^[8]

Personal life

Julia married Jean-Claude Pirotte in 1935, which helped her gain Belgian citizenship.

Photographs in the collections

Pirotte ceased her professional activities in March 1968. However, from 1980 her work aroused enthusiasm and brought her fame. She then exhibited in Poland, London, Charleroi, Stockholm, and New York song other locations. Pirotte’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of several European and American museums: