Hessy Levinsons Taft, a Jewish woman whose baby photograph was once promoted across Nazi Germany as a supposed model of Aryan perfection, died last week at her home in San Francisco, according to a report by The New York Times. She was 91.
Taft was just six months old in 1934 when her parents, Latvian Jewish opera singers living in Berlin, brought her to a studio for a professional portrait. The photographer, Hans Ballin, later submitted the image to a Nazi-sponsored competition seeking the ideal Aryan infant.
The photograph was ultimately chosen by Joseph Goebbels, the regime’s propaganda minister, and featured prominently on the cover of Sonne ins Haus, a publication aligned with Nazi ideology.
From there, the image was reproduced extensively, appearing in magazines, advertisements, postcards, and private homes throughout Germany as a visual endorsement of Nazi racial doctrine.
According to Taft’s obituary in The Times, when her parents confronted Ballin after discovering what had happened, he told them that he was fully aware the child was Jewish and had entered the photo deliberately, intending it as a subversive act to ridicule Nazi racial theories.
In a 2014 interview with Reuters, Taft said she later expressed gratitude to the photographer for taking that risk, even though he himself was not Jewish. “It was an irony that needed to be exposed.”
For her parents, however, the episode was terrifying. Afraid that the truth could lead to their execution, they kept their daughter largely confined indoors and avoided public outings, determined to prevent anyone from uncovering her identity.
Taft eventually made the story public in 1987 through the book Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember by Gertrude Schneider. Over time, she came to view the incident with a sense of defiance, describing it as an act of “good revenge.”
Reflecting on it years later, she told Tablet magazine in 2022: “I can laugh about it now, but if the Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn’t be alive.”
Although the Levinson family was living in Berlin when the photograph was taken, they were not initially subject to Nazi anti-Jewish laws because they were Latvian citizens rather than German nationals.
As the Nazi grip on Germany tightened, the family chose to leave in 1937. Their journey took them through Latvia, Paris, Nice, and Cuba before they ultimately made their way to New York City in 1949.
Taft later pursued a career in science, earning degrees in chemistry from Barnard College and Columbia University. She spent more than three decades at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, where she supervised Advanced Placement chemistry exams for high school students.
At 66, she began a new chapter as an adjunct professor at St. John’s University in Queens, where she taught chemistry and conducted research focused on water sustainability.
In 1959, she married Earl Taft, who died in 2021. She is survived by her sister, Noemi Pollack; her two children, Nina and Alex Taft; and four grandchildren.
{Matzav.com}
