In 1935, picture of a cherubic six-month-old baby girl was picked up by Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler’s propaganda machine as its symbol of the “perfect” Aryan baby.
According to reports in The Independent and The Daily Mail, the frontage was replicated across Nazi Germany on cards and posters without knowing that the baby was Jewish.
“I can laugh about it now,” the 80-year-old Professor Hessy Taft told Germany’s Bild newspaper in an interview. “But if the Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn’t be alive.”
Recently, Prof Taft presented the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel with a Nazi magazine featuring her baby photograph on the front cover, and told the story of how she became an improbable poster child for the Third Reich.
Her parents, singers Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, shifted to Berlin from Latvia to pursue careers in classical music in 1928, only to find them caught up in the Nazis’ rise to power.
Being a jews was the only reason for her father to lost his job at an opera company, and had to find work as a salesman.
In 1935, amid the anti-semitic attacks, Pauline took her six-month-old daughter Hessy to a famous Berlin photographer to have her photograph taken. That picture turned up on the front cover of Sonne ins Hause, a major Nazi family magazine.
Frightened the family would be out in the open as Jews, she hurried to the photographer, Hans Ballin. He told her he had intentionally submitted the photograph to a contest to find the most beautiful Aryan baby.
“I wanted to make the Nazis ridiculous,” his said. She was kept unseen as a baby from then on, till the end of the war.
The Israeli holocauset Muesem, Prof. Taft while donating a copy of the magazine to the Yad Vashem, said, “I feel a little revenge. Something likes satisfaction.”