Photography and The Holocaust: Then & Now

Henryk Ross (1910–1991) worked as a photographer for the Polish press before World War II began. Born in Warsaw Poland, he was living in Lodz in 1940 when the Nazis confined all Jews to the ghetto.  From 1940 to 1944, Ross documented life inside the Lodz Ghetto. Officially, Ross worked for the ghetto’s Jewish Administration’s Statistics department, photographing the Jewish ghetto’s inhabitants for identification cards and for Nazi propaganda images. When Ross was not working in his bureaucratic capacity he risked his life to photograph the reality of daily ghetto life.

The Lodz Ghetto was the second largest ghetto in Nazi occupied Europe and was a major source of slave labor. The ghetto was also a main waypoint on the route to Chelmno, the Nazi’s first extermination camp. From the Ghetto’s creation in 1939 to its liquidation in 1944, around 204,000 Jews lived in the Lodz Ghetto, but only 877 remained hidden in the ghetto by the time of the Soviet liberation in 1945.

Prior to the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944 via the death camps of Chelmno and Auschwitz, Ross buried about 6000 negatives he had taken, hoping to one day recover his historical record. After the war, Ross returned to discover that over 3000 of the negatives had survived.  When Ross exhumed those negatives, it was as if he was exhuming the dead. The poignant photographs provide evidence of life in the ghettos made under incredible danger and stress.

Ross and his wife, Stefania—whom he married in the ghetto in 1941—were among the remaining Lodz Ghetto residents liberated in 1945. After the war, Ross operated a photography business in Lodz, then moved to Israel with his family. In 1961, he testified at the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, which inspired him to make his Lodz Ghetto images public.