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Photographer of Interest - Selected by Editor: Henryk Ross: Documenting the Łódź Ghetto

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
In March 1945 a man who had witnessed far too much human misery dug into ground hardened by the Polish winter and retrieved what he had buried months earlier. His name was Henryk Ross. He had been an official photographer in the ghetto that Nazi occupiers created in Łódź (['wut͡ɕ], "wootsch"), a city in the heart of Poland. There, in the first half of the 1940s, they walled off tens of thousands of Jews. Ross was one of them. Working for the ghetto’s Department of Statistics, he shot identification-card photos and took propaganda pictures of textile and leather factory workers. Unofficially, he recorded the devastating realities of ghetto life.

In the summer of 1944, as wartime defeat loomed for them, the Nazis began to liquidate the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest in their network of such zones, after the notorious one in Warsaw. Sensing that the end was near, Mr. Ross put 6,000 of his negatives in canisters, placed them in a wooden container lined with tar, and buried them by his house. On Jan. 19, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated the ghetto, by then a shell of its former self. The Nazis, ever meticulous, had conducted a census in June 1940 and counted 160,320 Jews. By the liberation, only 877 had survived, Henryk Ross among them. That March, he dug up his trove of visual testimony. About half of the 6,000 negatives had been ruined by moisture but enough of them survived to make good on Mr. Ross’s vow to “leave a historical record of our martyrdom” and to show how those who perished once lived.

04.-Children-transported-to-the-Chelmo-nad-Nerem-death-camp_Henryk-Ross-770x697.jpg


02.-Man-walking-in-winter-in-the-remains-of-the-synagogue-on-Wolborska-Street-destroyed-in-1939-by-the-Germans_Henryk-Ross-770x698.jpg


The collection of pictures can be seen on the dedicated web site: http://agolodzghetto.com
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Jerome,

You have done a great service to those that were cruelly anhiliated in the Lodst Ghetto in the failing Nazi controlled Europe!

I have been studying tgrvlinks and I wish there was much more detail. I have found a 2017 Time Magazine link and there’s involvement of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to get the exhibition in Ontario.

I am now looking at the book “Memory Unearthed”. I thought “Order Prints” was a request for scholars to make their own connections between the pictures and comment on the meanings. But it’s to buy the book.

The prints shared are a mixture of very sharp well-preserved details and others seem to lack detail and are stained aging yellow!

I am surprised that they are not offering a more cleanly prepared set of pictures with the notes related not attached but put by the side of each picture. I imagine that there were insufficient funds. Given the existing 3,000 or more surviving prints I would hope they would be scanned and made available for study and as a shared memory.

What has been shared so far is hard to quantitate as I don’t see numbers quoted in the articles as to how many pictures have been prepared for sharing.

Asher
 

James Lemon

Well-known member
For me documentary is what photography is all about. I spend hours and hours looking at these types of images, current and past events. I also appreciate the risks that many photographers take on to bring us such photos.

Best, regards
James
 
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