W–005 · Documentary photograph and sources

“This Is a Home”

In autumn 1948, a teacher at a Warsaw school gave the children a prompt: “To jest dom”—“This is a home.” Seven- or eight-year-old Tereska drew a tangle of lines across the board. The school served children with physical and psychological injuries. David “Chim” Seymour photographed her at the blackboard.

Tereska stands at a blackboard filled with a tangle of chalk lines. Photograph by David “Chim” Seymour / Magnum Photos, Warsaw, 1948.

Provenance and sources for frame 1

David “Chim” Seymour made the picture; Magnum Photos holds the archive and rights. The National Gallery of Art has a print in its Corcoran Collection, 2016.117.281. The displayed digital copy comes from TIME and remains copyrighted. Displayed file: 803 × 1000 pixels. The source identifies this image as copyrighted. Full image record in Russian.

nga.gov time.com View image file

Seymour arrived in Poland near the end of a journey through five European countries. Commissioned by UNICEF, he was photographing children who had lived through the war. His Warsaw series included lessons, the schoolyard, a therapeutic garden and children at work among the city’s ruins. LIFE published Tereska’s picture in December 1948 with a caption about the unseen wounds of war. Edward Steichen included it in The Family of Man; the girl at the board became widely known.

For years she was described as a concentration-camp survivor. In 2017, researchers tried to reconstruct her life. They compared Seymour’s contact sheets with the layout of buildings, a school film from 1948, class lists and family photographs. Of three pupils named Teresa, one matched the age and appearance: Teresa Adwentowska. It is a probable identification; the negative has no record bearing the girl’s surname.

During the Warsaw Uprising, the Adwentowski family home was destroyed and Teresa suffered a shrapnel wound to the head. Her father, Jan Klemens, who had links to the Polish Underground State, survived Gestapo torture. After the fighting, four-year-old Teresa and her fourteen-year-old sister walked to a village about sixty kilometres from Warsaw. The journey took three weeks.

A school record describes a talkative girl who liked learning and drawing flowers and animals. Adwentowska’s condition worsened over the years. From the mid-1960s she lived at Tworki psychiatric hospital, where she died in 1978 after choking on food. These facts concern Teresa Adwentowska; her identification as the girl at the board remains a hypothesis.

1. “This is a home”