Another fascinating (side) discovery day. While working on my thesis and looking at some more images from the 1955 Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw, I found this image... It is obvious, that it was selected by the CAF editor for print. We can see his cropping markings - instruction for the lab of how to print the image for circulation in press. But if the image was selected, I wondered, why the face of one of the depicted people is covered? Someone clearly didn't want it to be visible. And there is a name written on the faceless figure...
I googled the name, and it turns out that Emil Zatopek is a winner of 3 gold medals during the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki. According to this article from Independent, he took a stand against Soviet led tanks of the Warsaw Pact army invading Czechoslovakia in 1968. The above article describes in detail Emil's role in the protests, and disappearance from the public life he had to face after the communist took the power again.
Removal of individuals, seen as traitors, from Soviet photographs is widely researched, but it is the first example I found myself of such a case in Poland (having said that, I am sure there are plenty more examples of that from the Stalinist period, and that they were also researched). It is interesting that the removal happened almost 15 years after the image was taken (there is no other logical explanation). I can't imagine that someone went through archives with aim to remove Zatopek's face from images, I think the image was found after 1968, accidentally, when looking for other photographs, and destroyed on occasion. But then again, who knows? There are few more questions though. Is the negative of that image in tact? Are other images of him destroyed as well (there is only one more example of destruction of an image I found in the festival archives)? I guess it is a material for a short essay, I have no time to write 
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