My Secret Camera: Life in the Lodz Ghetto

ANNOTATION

Photographs taken secretly by a young Jewish man document the fear, hardship, generosity, and humanity woven through the daily life of the Jews forced to live in the Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust.

SYNOPSIS

Powerful photographs taken by a young man confined to a Jewish ghetto bear witness to life during the Holocaust.

In 1940 as Nazi troops rolled across Europe, countless Jewish families were forced from their homes into isolated ghettos, labor and concentration camps. In the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, Mendel Grossman refused to surrender to the suffering around him, secretly taking thousands of heartrending photographs documenting the hardship and the struggle for survival woven through the daily lives of the people imprisoned with him. Someday, he hoped, the world would learn the truth. My Secret Camera is his legacy.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Grossman, a Polish Jew, was forced into the Lodz ghetto at its inception in May 1940. For the next four years, until the ghetto was destroyed, Grossman used his privileges as a photographer for the ghetto administration to covertly take thousands of pictures documenting life in the ghetto. The 17 photographs on these pages show the suffering so copiously described by historians and survivors--soldiers march through emptied streets; freighted with bundles and rucksacks, heavily dressed people head toward what is surely deportation; a solitary child clutches a wire fence. They are heartbreaking. But even more wrenching are the photos of less iconic scenes. Readers see a team of workers smiling as they bake Passover matzoh and teenagers laughing at some delicious joke. Unfortunately, Smith, a rabbi and a photographer, is not content to let the photos speak for themselves, and he scripts a brief narrative, delivered as if by Grossman. It is numbingly formulaic ("My own pain does not matter. I must show what the Nazis are doing to my people. My pictures will tell the real story, even if I die"), and although he explains how the photographs survived despite Grossman's death, nowhere does he comment on how he arrived at his text, for instance, if the names he assigns some figures are real. For all his piety, his commentary underserves Grossman's work. Ages 8-up. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Children's Literature - Childrens Literature

The handwriting was on the wall as Jews were rounded up from all over Poland and squeezed into isolation and catastrophe in the ghetto of Lodz. Somehow Mendel Grossman, age 27, managed to take thousands of photographs with a camera hidden beneath his raincoat, the one with a hole in the pocket for the lens. As official photographer for the Jews' identity cards, he had a darkroom and chemicals which he used at night at great risk to develop his own pictures. Although most of the carefully hidden photos were eventually lost, some survived to bear witness to the truth of the horror created by the Nazis. The sensitive text has been created by a writer who is also a rabbi and photographer himself. This is a book youngsters can read by themselves, yet it cries for an adult to help discover the depths of the old, grainy, black-and-white photographs. Grossman died just days before the Germans surrendered; his work--much of it on display at Kibbutz Lohamei Haghetaot in the Museum of the Holocaust and Resistance and also at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem--lives to tell the tale, we all must remember, of the lives guttered out by a madman. 2000, Gulliver/Harcourt, Ages 8 up, $16.00. Reviewer: Judy Chernak—Children's Literature

VOYA

Using a hidden camera, twenty-seven-year old Mendel Grossman took hundreds of photographs while being held captive in the Lodz Ghetto. This book contains sixteen of his photos. These haunting pictures do not simply convey daily life in the ghetto; they bear witness to the Nazi persecution of the Jewish population. Upon initial examination, the accompanying first-person text appears to have been written by the photographer. The two-page afterword, however, informs the reader that Grossman died on a forced march from a prison camp shortly before the German surrender. Instead the text is written by Dabba Smith, a man who neither lived in the Lodz Ghetto during this period nor endured the Holocaust himself. As such, the first-person text seriously lessens the credibility of the book. Indeed, it seems presumptuous of the author to have written as if he were Grossman. The publisher might have created a more credible book in several ways: the text could have been written in third person; the photographs could have been accompanied by simple, discrete captions; or the publisher could have allowed the startling photographs to speak for themselves. The two-page note about the photographer might have been positioned better in the front of the book; the real story is here. Source notes could have been provided. Grossman's surviving photographs and negatives are, without question, priceless. This book, however, does not do justice to Grossman's work, to his memory, or to the legacy left by him and other Holocaust survivors. VOYA CODES: 2Q 4P M J S (Better editing or work by the author might have warranted a 3Q; Broad general YA appeal; Middle School, defined as grades 6 to 8; Junior High,defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2000, Gulliver Books/Harcourt, 32p. Ages 12 to 18. Reviewer: Mary Ann Capan VOYA, February 2001 (Vol. 23, No.6)

School Library Journal

Gr 3-6-This remarkable photo-essay about the Lodz Ghetto in Poland poignantly introduces Holocaust horrors. Grossman was a prisoner there for more than four years, and while his "job" was to take photographs for work permits, he secretly used his camera to record the daily lives of his fellow Jewish residents. The text, written as though Grossman himself were explaining how he took the pictures and commenting on the emotions of his subjects, is simple and lets each picture speak for itself. This technique works well and makes the subject accessible to children. The 17 haunting images are not graphic or physically gruesome, but they do show young boys harnessed to carts, men lining up for bread, and families saying horrible good-byes through chain-link fences. They also show people relaxing on the grass, smiling, and singing-a testament to the undying spirit of some prisoners. As these are personal, secret photographs and not the propaganda pictures so often repeated in history books, their significance is great and they are historically fascinating. The incredible story of how the photos have survived is recounted in an appended note. A truly powerful book.-Andrew Medlar, Chicago Public Library, IL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Kirkus Reviews

During the Nazi occupation of the Lodz ghetto, Mendel Grossman took black and white photographs with a camera hidden under his coat. The photographer died during the war, but before his death he hid thousands of his negatives and distributed copies of his photographs to friends and relatives hoping that some would survive. Powerful images selected from those that still exist in Israeli museum collections show the Jewish experience during 1944. Children harnessed by ropes dragging a heavy cart, adults and children, identified as Jews by stars of David sewn onto their clothing, huddle together with bundles of possessions. Street scenes depict people behind fences, sharing food, working, laughing together. One poignant image shows a woman and several children separated by a fence from another child. The woman seems to be speaking to the lone child saying, "Be strong, my boy." The first-person text purports to be the artists' words. However, there are no explanatory notes about the text in the short biographical sketch of the photographer. Dealing with historical events (which are doubted by some), the author has a responsibility to document his sources. If the text is taken from Grossman's own words, the documentation should be included either in the text or in endnotes. Although the photographs are moving, the text weakens them and does a disservice to children who deserve a rigorous approach to primary source materials. Catalogued as nonfiction, but the text may be fictionalized. (Nonfiction. 9-12)

ACCREDITATION

Mendel Grossman (1913-1945) was born into a Hasidic family in Lodz, Poland. He died on a forced march just days before the Germans surrendered to the Allies.