Hotel owner Heinrich Jast was a sergeant in the German army, stationed near Warsaw, who became curious about the corpses he had seen lying along the ghetto walls. So on his birthday he made use of his free time and went into the ghetto with his camera. He had no idea what was awaiting him there. The amateur photographer shot several rolls of film in September 1941 and kept them for decades without showing them to anyone. In 1982, he gave the photographs to Stern magazine reporter Gnther Schwarberg. The Jerusalem Documentation Center Yad Vashem pronounced them a ''unique find,'' and they certainly are--Jast's pictures belong to the scant number of existing photographs of the Warsaw ghetto, and are a critically important document of its history. Gnther Schwarberg: In the Ghetto of Warsaw documents these incomparable photographs along with Jast's own recollections as recounted to Gnter Schwarberg.