Nearly everyone knows this photograph. Warsaw, mid - September ‘39. Desperate young girl bends over her older sister killed by a German airman. Pain, fear, tears, despair, a feeling of defeat, also the barbarity of the aggressor. The symbolic image of the first days of World War II. The author of the photograph is an American, his name is Julien Bryan.

In the summer of 1939, being already a well known photographer and filmmaker, he was in Europe, where he was shooting his next documentary films. On September 1, he took the train in Venice and a week later arrived at the besieged Warsaw. He was the only photographer in the city. President Starzyński gave him a car and an assistant. On September 16, on the Polish Radio, Julien Bryan told the world about the suffering of civilians, about the total war, which Germans wage and about "the most hideous killing of people in the modern times".

He took hundreds of photos and shoot a few hours of video material showing the besieged Warsaw, bombing, collapsing houses and hospitals, human bodies lying in the streets, building of barricades, refugees on the Poniatowski bridge, the tragedy of civilians, the German strength and arrogance.

In dramatic circumstances, Julien Bryan managed to leave Warsaw and smuggled the priceless documentation to America. Tens of millions of people saw the first chronicle and newspaper reportages based on this documentary material. They could learn the truth about German cruelty against civilians and violations of basic rights of war.

In September 1959 Julien Bryan came back to Warsaw. He visited places he photographed twenty years earlier and met people from his pictures, these, who survived. Among them was a young girl from the famous photo.

Today in Warsaw is the son of Julien Bryan, Sam, proud of the work of his father, a friend of Poland and Polish people. One of the reasons of his visit is the premiere of a film about his father and the album „Oblężenie Warszawy w fotografii Juliena Bryana – Siege of Warsaw in the photographs of Julien Bryan” released by the Institute of National Remembrance in Polish and English.