Over 200 Concentration Camps and Ghettos in Poland, Poster by W. Guranowski
This World War II–era poster, titled “Over 200 Concentration Camps and Ghettos in Poland” was created by the artist W. Guranowski and issued in New York by the Polish Government Information Center (also known as the Polish Information Center). The large silkscreen design—depicting hands grasping barbed wire and listing grim statistics about German atrocities—formed part of a coordinated communication campaign by the Polish Government-in-Exile in London to alert Western publics to the scale of German crimes in occupied Poland. The Center, established in 1940 from the staff of the Polish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, became the official U.S. branch of the Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation in London. By 1943, it operated with a staff of over 50 people and a million-dollar budget, producing exhibitions, press releases, radio programs, and visual materials, such as this poster, to keep the tragedy of occupied Poland in the American conscience.
The data featured on the poster—up to two million Poles deported to forced labor, hundreds of thousands executed, and two million Jews murdered—reflects figures drawn from contemporary exile-government reports such as The Black Book of Poland (New York, 1942) and The German New Order in Poland (London, 1942). These compilations of verified eyewitness accounts and official German documents were among the earliest systematic efforts to quantify Germany’s terror. The poster distilled those findings into a single shocking image that could reach mass audiences far beyond academic or diplomatic circles.
Archival records held at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives (Stanford University) confirm that the Polish Information Center maintained extensive correspondence, printed matter, and propaganda materials on German and Soviet occupation policies. While Guranowski’s personal background remains little documented, his work for the Center exemplifies the powerful visual language used by Polish émigré artists to communicate suffering and resistance to the Allied world. Today the poster stands as both a historical artifact of wartime information strategy and a stark, enduring testimony to the realities of Nazi occupation in Poland.
