Lódź Ghetto Album

Henryk Ross (1910-91) was a Jewish press photographer in Poland before World War II. Incarcerated by the invading Germans in the Lodz ghetto, he became one of its two official photographers. His duties afforded him access to photographic facilities which he used to secretly photograph the atrocities of Lodz, while also recording scenes of domestic life among the ghetto "elite." As the Germans began the liquidation of Lodz in 1944, Ross buried his 3,000 negatives. Surviving the Holocaust, he recovered them and, from his postwar home in Israel, circulated images showing the horrors of Lodz. But until now, the bulk of his photographs have remained unseen, including many of the ghetto police. For an audience accustomed to dramatic photographs of Holocaust suffering, the quiet, domestic scenes he recorded are poignant and sometimes shocking, challenging us to rethink what we understand about ghetto society. With a foreword by bestselling Holocaust expert Robert-Jan van Pelt, and with an appendix of original documents, this volume is introduced with an informative, illustrated essay by historian Thomas Weber. Published in association with the Archive of Modern Conflict. In the spring of 1940, the German forces occupying Poland drove the Jews of Lodz into the Holocaust's 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