The Daily Telegraph, September 25, 2004
Poignant.
The Guardian, July 14, 2004
The photographs raise uncomfortable questions about divisions within the ghetto, and Ross's relationship with those he photographed is still unclear.
The Sunday Times Magazine, August 22, 2004
[The Lodz Ghetto Album] reveals an unexpected side to life in Poland’s last remaining ghetto.
SomethingJewish.co.uk, September 19, 2004
A stunning, challenging, and thought provoking book.
Book Description
Born in 1913, Henryk Ross was a press photographer in Poland before World War II. As a Jew, he was incarcerated by the invading Germans in the Lodz Ghetto (Poland's largest ghetto after Warsaw) where he became one of two official photographers, producing identity and propaganda photographs for its Department of Statistics. His duties afforded him access to film and processing facilities, and he used these to create a unique record of ghetto life, secretly photographing the atrocities of Lodz and making family and group portraits of (and presumably for) the ghetto elite. As the Germans began the liquidation of Lodz in 1944, he buried his archive of 3,000 negatives. Surviving the Holocaust, he was able to recover them after the war. From his post-war home in Israel, he circulated images showing the horrors of Lodz, including these in his own books and as testimony in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. However, Ross apparently took no further interest in the domestic photographs, which have remained unprinted until today. In 1997, after Ross's death, his son sold the archive to a private collection in London and only now has the breadth of Ross's record of ghetto life been freshly examined for the first time. For an audience accustomed to seeing dramatic photographs of suffering in the Polish ghettos, the quiet, domestic scenes he recorded are a revealing and poignant surprise, and an important addition to the historical record.
Edited by Martin Parr, the book's foreword is by highly respected Holocaust historian and expert Robert-Jan Van Pelt.
From the Author
In terms of its scope, all other photographic records of ghetto life pale in comparison. These photographs have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of ghetto life. 'The Lodz Ghetto Album' demands us to revisit the social order of the ghetto and the scope of collaboration and resistance in the Holocaust. It will change our comprehension of human behaviour in the Holocaust. The dilemmas between collaboration and resistance were not confined to the Jewish Council and the Jewish Police, as held by the conventional wisdom. As the book reveals, all ghetto residents alike had to navigate competing loyalties and an almost-inevitable combination of heroism and compromise, collaboration and resistance.
From the Inside Flap
Henryk Ross was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1910, becoming a sports and general press photographer first in Warsaw, then Lodz, before World War II. As a Jew, he was incarcerated in the Lodz ghetto with his wife Stefania where he became one of two official photographers, producing identity and propaganda photographs for its Department of Statistics. His duties afforded him access to film and processing facilities and he used these to create a record of the ghetto, risking his life to secretly document the deportations, hangings and other atrocities. As the liquidation of the ghetto began in 1944, he buried his archive of 3,000 negatives and other ghetto records for safekeeping. Surviving the Holocaust (as a member of the ghetto clean-up squad intact at the time the Red Army liberated Lodz), he was able to recover the archive after the war. From his post-war home in Israel, where he worked as a photographer and zincographer, he circulated images showing the horrors of Lodz, including in his 1960s book The Last Journey of the Jews of Lodz and at the trial of the Holocaust-mastermind, Adolf Eichmann. He catalogued his photographs in 1987. Ross died in Israel in 1991.
From the Back Cover
In the spring of 1940, the German forces occupying Poland drove the Jews of Lodz into the Holocausts second-largest and most hermetically-sealed ghetto. It functioned both as a sweatshop serving the German war effort, and a prison for Jews en route to the death camps of Chelmno and Auschwitz. Self-governed by its Council of Elders with its own police force, currency and postage stamps its leader was the notorious Chaim Rumkowski. He complied with German orders, believing that the value of Lodzs labour might secure survival for the majority. History proved him decisively wrong: 95% of the ghettos inmates perished. Those who survived starvation rations, disease and prior deportations were removed to the gas chambers of Auschwitz when the ghetto was liquidated in 1944.
Henryk Ross was a photographer employed by the ghettos Department of Statistics who kept a clandestine diary of ghetto life in powerful and often brilliant images. When the ghettos liquidation began, he buried them. A survivor, he dug them up after the war, releasing many that were to become icons of the Holocausts atrocities. But he released only a minority of the pictures during his lifetime. After Rosss death in 1991, his archive the most extensive collection of ghetto photographs by any single photographer was acquired by the Archive of Modern Conflict in London.
This book is the first independent look at the entirety of Rosss ghetto photographs. Many of the images are what we expect searing documents of the machinery of the Holocaust and the suffering of its victims. But other private photographs reveal life in the ghetto, with happiness sometimes, as Ross states in his catalogue, showing aspects of a privileged life. Published here for the first time, they add an unexpected, complex and poignant dimension to the photographic record of the ghetto, and demand a reassessment of how we understand its social order. Together with the public photographs, and the knowledge that almost everyone depicted perished in the Holocausts gas vans and chambers, they expose Germanys implementation of the Holocaust as even more divisively cruel than we previously imagined.
About the Author
Author: Thomas Weber was born in Hagen, near Dortmund, Germany, in 1974. Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, he gained his PhD from Oxford University, on the nationalism, anti-Semitism, racism and militarism of British and German elites before the First World War. He has worked as a research assistant for Professor Niall Ferguson, on Ian Kershaw’s Hitler I (1998), and Ben Macintyre’s A Foreign Field (2000). Until July 2004, he was lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow. Lodz Ghetto Album is his first book. Photos selected by: Martin Parr and Timothy Prus. Martin Parr is a leading and influential figure in British photography. Born in Epsom, England, he established his reputation with the publication of his photographs of New Brighton beach near Liverpool, The Last Resort. A prolific image-maker, collector and curator, Parr’s recent books include Boring Postcards, Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight – the John Hinde Butlin’s Postcards, Bliss and a survey of his own work, Martin Parr by Val Williams. Parr lives in Bristol and is a member of Magnum Photos. Timothy Prus studied Art and Cultural History at Sussex University and the Royal College of Art. The Henryk Ross pictures form part of the photographic collection at the Archive of Modern Conflict in London of which he is curator. Foreword by Robert Jan van Pelt, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in Canada. His most recent books are The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (2002) and Holocaust: A History (2002, co-authored with Deborah Dwork). An internationally recognized authority on the history of Auschwitz, van Pelt chaired the team that developed plans for the preservation of Auschwitz, and served as an expert witness for the defence in the notorious libel case Irving vs. Penguin and Lipstadt.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Leafing through a binder with photos taken by Henryk Ross in the Lodz ghetto, I could not escape the anger and compassion that always rises when I confront the abomination of the Nazi ghettos in Poland. The rage and the pity are not difficult to explain. Even after working as a Holocaust historian for two decades, I have not become used to the pictures of the rag-clad urchins scavenging scraps of food, the dejected grown-ups trading their last meagre possession which no-one needs, and the harrowed people pulling the excrement wagons. The stolen images of the public hangings, the corpses awaiting burial and the anguish of the deportations to the death camps still nauseate me. These are the photos I know well: images that have been published in general histories of the Holocaust, or more focused accounts of the Lodz ghetto.
But as I turned the pages of the binder, there were other photos that I had never seen before; pictures that caused a feeling of apprehension and even an unexpected annoyance. There were photos showing well-dressed children enjoying a party, of grown-ups acting up for the camera, and of the pleasures of a wedding reception. For me, and not only for me, these pictures testify to the uncomfortable fact that, amongst the pauperised and starving mass of ghetto inmates, in the wrenching situation imposed by the Germans, a small minority fared relatively well. These included those who occupied positions in the Jewish Council or its administration, or people who had been able to save some of their wealth, or opportunists who adapted to the whatever opportunities existed in the bewildering ordeal of segregation, starvation, disease and slave labour.
I had read about these people, and the way they had been able to carve out small enclaves of relative privilege amidst a hell of cruelty and suffering. Both survivors, and others who had never suffered the world of the Nazi ghettos, reproached the favoured after the war for their lack of solidarity with those who had died just steps away. And they condemned those who had bought an exemption from deportation one persons exemption being at the expense of someone else having to go. Many felt a shame that so many had grasped the opportunity to endure the ordeal with a degree of comfort or with an illusion of control over a very uncertain future. How much more edifying was the self-sacrifice of a Janusz Korczak, who had protected his orphans while he could, and who then chose to share their death rather than seek his own safety. And thus these photos showing privilege amidst general destitution some cheer amidst despair did not find a place in the histories we published, to remain hidden in forbidden drawers and closed files.
Two generations after the Germans liquidated the Lodz ghetto, we are ready for the whole picture, and therefore need every single photograph. As I consider all of the images that Henry Ross took and saved, the differences between the seemingly privileged and the obviously destitute fade in the knowledge that almost all of the people caught by his camera were murdered shortly thereafter. The pathos of this halts my all-too-easy reflections on the meaning and memory of social and economic distinctions in the anteroom of Auschwitz. It makes me shudder that, very likely, each of the pictures in this album is the last record of each of these peoples unique lives. In the face of this forlorn fact, there remains nothing but to cease conversation and return to observation.
Robert Jan van Pelt
Toronto, March 2004
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