Henryk Ross (1910 – 1991), a Jewish-born Polish photojournalist, was among the 877 survivors of the Lodz ghetto in Poland. The Nazis held more than 200,000 people captive in this ghetto between 1940 and 1945. Ross served as the official photographer of the ghetto, which was under the control of the Nazi-led Jewish Council. He was among the privileged few in the ghetto, tasked with photographing official documents and creating propaganda images that highlighted the productivity of the ghetto. Despite the risks to his life, Ross also documented the stark reality and daily tragedies of life in the ghetto, including the mass deportations to death camps in Poland.
For the first two years, Ross had the freedom to roam with his camera. He captured images of Jews working in the over 100 factories in the area, the Jewish police who lived in better conditions than the workers, and life in the barbed-wire-lined streets of the ghetto. After 1941, he began to operate more covertly, taking photos from unusual angles; behind doors, through cracks, or concealed within his coat. Despite these challenges, Ross managed to document the large crowds at the daily soup kitchens, children scavenging in the dirt for food or firewood, and, in 1942, the first ‘relocations’ as the Nazi regime euphemistically called them. He photographed loaded wagons carrying children under 10 and the elderly sick to Chelmno, a death camp located 30 miles away.
Shortly before the ghetto was closed, I buried my negatives so that some record of our tragedy, namely the complete extermination of the Jews of Lodz by the Nazi executioners, could be found. I feared the total disappearance of Polish Jews. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom.
In the summer of 1944, with Germany’s defeat in the war becoming increasingly certain, the clearing of the ghetto began. Ross, who had been spared the “relocation” process due to his job, saw the end approaching. Fearing “the total disappearance of the Jews of Poland”, as he would later confess, he buried over 6,000 negatives and photographs in a wooden container. “Shortly before the ghetto was closed, I buried my negatives so that some record of our tragedy, namely the complete extermination of the Jews of Lodz by the Nazi executioners, could be found. I feared the total disappearance of Polish Jews. “I aimed to leave a historical record of our martyrdom,” Ross stated. In 1945, after the ghetto was liberated by the Red Army, Ross returned to his archives and discovered that at least half of his hidden treasures had survived the deterioration and moisture of the soil.
“The survival of these photographs is a miracle in itself,” says Kristen Gresh, the curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. On March 25, the museum opened the exhibition “Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross.” The exhibit showcases over 200 of Ross’s potent photographs, providing a rare glimpse into this bleak period of history and the life inside the Lodz Ghetto from 1940 to 1944.
The exhibition is open to the public until June 30, 2017. More information can be found here.
