“It must be understood that ghetto of Litzmannstadt was planned not as a Jewish ghetto, but as a ghetto for Jews.” ~ Łódź Ghetto Chronicle
The Łódź Ghetto was as isolated from the outside world as if it were a raft cast afloat in hostile waters, hundreds of miles from the nearest shore. That the Polish name of the city, where it was carved out seemingly overnight, on February 8, 1940, means boat, seems a cruel irony. Like those stranded at sea attempt to tell their course from unfamiliar stars and weather patterns, the inmates of the ghetto interpreted the comings and goings of their captors, read between the lines of official bulletins and ordinances, and caught snippets of news on an illegal radio. Today we are in possession of much information to which the ghetto residents had no access; yet when it comes to retracing the steps of the individuals confined in the ghetto, in many cases, we are left with little more than footprints on water. We must piece together diary fragments, learn to read between the lines of the heavily censored material compiled by the ghetto’s administration, and restore the context of the extant iconography.
Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross, an exhibition originally organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015 and currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, offers a rare glimpse of the daily life — and death — in the Łódź ghetto as seen through one man’s camera lens. A carefully curated selection of prints, negatives, and photomontages sheds light on previously unseen aspects of the ghetto as well as on the dual — authorized and clandestine — activity of one of its official photographers.
Constituted in November of 1940, six months after the ghetto had been sealed off from the outside world, the Archives section of the ghetto’s administration began systematically collecting official proclamations and correspondence, visual materials, as well as some books and documents left behind by the deportees. The archivists kept a daily chronicle of the ghetto;[1] conducted censuses, recording arrivals and deportations, births and miscarriages, “natural” deaths, executions, and suicides; they kept statistical data on workshop manufacture, food rations, and shortages; and even noted the weather. Materials were assembled for a ghetto encyclopedia.[2] The administration also employed two photographers tasked with documenting formal occasions and supplying every ghetto resident with an identity-card photograph, as well as creating propaganda pictures to help justify the ghetto’s continued existence.
A Łódź native, Henryk Ross worked as a photojournalist before the war, covering sports events for popular Polish magazines. Passing through his hometown when the ghetto was definitively closed off on April 30, 1940, he found himself trapped behind the barbed wire.[3] Between 1940 and 1944, he assembled a body of over 6,000 negatives and prints. Like a castaway who confides his last message to the sea, Ross, feeling deportation was imminent, buried his images in the ground in tar-coated tins. In contrast to his fellow photographer, Mendel Grossman, who was deported in August 1944 and died during a forced march shortly thereafter, and whose negatives were recovered from their hiding place after the liberation only to perish during the war in Israel in 1948,[4] Ross was spared as part of the cleanup crew. Although half of his negatives were destroyed, the surviving images paint a complex portrait of the ghetto.
Of the 3,000 images now housed in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), and accessible online at http://agolodzghetto.com/, only a handful were made public during Ross’s lifetime. The commissioned images were intended to show the community as efficient and productive. Originally designed to isolate the Jewish population, the Łódź ghetto was quickly transformed into a source of slave labor. Between November 1940 and February 1943, the number of workshops had grown threefold, from 30 to 96, employing at the peak of their activity over 61,000 people.[5] The workshops supplied the Wehrmacht and the civil sector with uniforms and clothes, shoes, rugs, mattresses, and leather goods; they also lined the pockets of the Nazi administrators—foremost among whom was Amtsleiter Hans Biebow, a coffee merchant from Bremen, who had volunteered for the post as a way of avoiding direct combat and turned it into a lucrative venture. Starting in September 1942, all residents aged ten and older had to show proof of employment; any “unproductive elements” were ruthlessly deported. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the ghetto’s highly controversial director, staked the survival of the ghetto on his ability to maintain peace and productivity, at the expense of complying with deportation orders.
The exhibition includes several thematic series showing the operation of the workshops and other forms of labor in the ghetto: leather processing, mattress manufacture, as well as a bakery, sewage collection, among others. The gestures in those photographs are often carefully posed, so as to best illustrate the workers’ activity at every stage of production. Even in those propaganda photos Ross shows an eye for the human detail: sometimes he zooms in on a laborer’s skilled hands; other times, he highlights teamwork. He likes moments of spontaneous activity, as in the photo showing a bread cart hauled by several boys of different ages, one of the boy’s legs slightly blurred as he takes a step forward, struggling to pull the heavy load. Although these photos were destined to document the ghetto’s usefulness, and were often compiled into commemorative albums presented to the Nazis, what we see in them today, beyond evidence of exploitation and privation, are human faces gazing back at one of their own, with hope and resilience, and reaching out to us across time.
Between the official shots, sometimes on the same roll of film, Henryk Ross photographed another side of the ghetto. At times quite openly, as the subjects’ eyes turned toward the camera attest, he portrayed crowds of deportees escorted out of the ghetto, or starving residents digging for scraps of rotting food in the ground. Other times, he risked his life to capture scenes that neither Rumkowski nor the Nazis wanted to see documented.
In a filmed video screened at the entrance to the exhibition, Ross demonstrates how he went about taking “illegal” pictures: his camera hanging down his neck, he would put on an ample overcoat and then part it just long enough to release the shutter. The resulting images are framed instinctively, perhaps even while looking literally over his shoulder. In this manner, Ross photographed public hangings at Bazarny Square; he photographed emaciated bodies of hunger victims and corpses loaded onto carts; he photographed the courtyard of the Central Prison at 6 Czarniecki Street,[6] populated, at different times, by “criminal” prisoners and persons awaiting deportation. In one photo, we can see a mother, who had been separated from her children during a raid, bidding goodbye to her sons through a chain-link fence.[7]
Photographic evidence of Nazi crimes, these images were widely circulated in the press and were used in the Eichmann trial. In his oral testimony, Ross described how, disguised as a cleaner, he was smuggled outside the ghetto, into the Radogoszcz train station, where, locked in a shed in view of the rail track, he observed, through a crack in the woodwork, people being herded into the darkness of the box cars. He spent an entire shift in his hiding place — that is, some 9.5 hours — within earshot of the Gestapo overseeing the “operation.” How many photographs did he take that day? Five, including four negatives and several prints, and one print without a negative, survive in the AGO collections. Surprisingly, while negatives are one of the focal points of the exhibition, and many images on display are enlarged positive prints of film segments complete with sprocket holes, photographs taken on that day in August 1944 are featured without the negatives. Of the three included in the exhibition, two are presented in a sequence of five photographs, printed on similar jagged-edged paper stock, and arranged out of chronological order: shots of hundreds of people, bundles slung over their shoulders, filing through the streets towards the north-east gate, alternate with the two clandestine shots. The third, larger in format, unevenly trimmed and printed after the war in Israel, as the photographer’s signature in Hebrew and Latin script indicates, is mounted in a separate frame. When were the other images printed? Was it Ross himself who constructed the narrative sequence?
While the exhibition includes some of Ross’s photomontages and collages, his work as photo-editor is, with one notable exception, absent from the discussion. The curatorial decision to show either the negative or the original print tends to obscure the relationship between the two. This is particularly true of the clandestine photos. By cropping what George Didi-Huberman refers to as the “zone in which ‘there is nothing to see’ ”[8] — an area of the image which, while seemingly devoid of content, is essential to understanding the photograph’s phenomenology — Henryk Ross cuts himself out of the picture. Most likely developed after the war — as suggested by the rubber stamp of his studio, “Fotograf prasowy. / HENRYK ROSS / Łódź, ul. Gdańska 15,” imprinted on the verso of one of the photographs[9] — these images doubly bear witness. Although the persons we see boarding the freight cars had no way of knowing their destination, and the ghetto chroniclers to the bitter end reported on the liquidation of the ghetto under the heading “Labor outside the ghetto,” we know today that the transports headed for Auschwitz and that few of those captured by Ross’s camera that day are likely to have survived. Hidden in the cement shed at the train station, apart from the deported group, Henryk Ross was an outside observer; as a ghetto inmate, however, subject to the same ruthless logic, he was an insider. Their fate could have been his. In developing the photographs, he centered in on the victims, on the ghetto police escorting them (recognizable by their round hats reminiscent of French kepis), and on the rifle-bearing Gestapo. Looking at those photos today, it is hard to escape the analogy between the darkness of the train cars waiting to receive their “passengers,” and the dark shadows of the crematoria towards which they were being ferried. While Ross made a conscious decision to eliminate all trace of his presence — the dark edges of the wooden frame against which he had pressed his lens — it is the task of historians and curators today to restore the full context, and allow the photographs to also bear witness to the gesture of the photographer.
One of the most heartrending photographs in the exhibition is another image of deportations, documenting a tragic chapter in the history of the ghetto. On the third anniversary of the war, the Eldest of the Jews, Rumkowski, was asked to deliver 25,000 people, including the sick and those aged under ten and over sixty-five. An estimated 15,859 persons were sent to their death in Chełmno in September 1942, including many children. Unlike previous “resettlement” actions, the raids were conducted without any lists and with utmost brutality.[10]
Where did the photographer position himself as he trained his lens on the horse-drawn wagons, loaded with children, rolling down a cobblestone street? The September 1942 deportation took place during a total curfew forbidding any unauthorized person from leaving their residence. The photograph is taken at street level, suggesting that he might have stepped inside a doorway; or he may have been shooting from a ground-floor window: the building he would have been in is shorter than the surrounding structures, as we can tell from the shadow that barely extends beyond the edge of the sidewalk; in this part of Łódź, wooden, single-story dwellings sat side by side modern tenements. In any case, the photographer is not invisible: a few of the children, two seated at the edge of the cart and leaning against the battered side panel, and the boy standing in the back, wearing a threadbare knit sweater he had outgrown, appear to be looking in his direction: perhaps the lens caught a flicker of light, signaling the photographer’s presence. The photograph has also captured the figures of some onlookers: a woman and a man are standing on a balcony, partially visible in the left corner of the frame, and two men are looking down through a second-story window in the middle section of the building, one of them not much older than the deportees; the star of David sewn onto the older man’s jacket stands out against the darker fabric. Most children in the cart are looking up at those lucky enough to be left behind: are they exchanging last messages? Perhaps some are searching for familiar faces? We will never know. The smells of a late summer afternoon,[11] the warmth of the sun and the clear blue sky — which, three years before, had ushered a new academic year and the uncertain news of enemy movements —, and the sounds of the children’s voices and the sluggish clip-clopping of horses’ hooves, cannot be captured on film. And yet we can imagine, and we do feel, the helplessness the photographer must have felt: if only the magic of photography were not to capture lifelike images but to hold those within its view safe and alive…
There are three photographers in Henryk Ross: the journalist working on assignment, capable of instantly arranging a scene and putting his subjects at ease — you can tell how comfortable they are in front of his camera. Then there is Ross the historian, the witness, keenly aware of his task of recording the truth of what is happening around him, even if it means breaking both the Nazi interdicts and the explicit orders of the Judenrat. He is a wily photographer: he knows how to stockpile film and save half a roll by taking a dozen ID pictures in one sitting; he knows all the alleys and doorways; he has eyes on the back of his head. And then there is the third photographer: he might be the most important one — without him the other two wouldn’t have had the strength to carry on; he is also the most modest, he never shows his photographs after the war, and few ever learn of his existence — until now. The third photographer is, simply put, a photography lover: he seeks out shards of beauty even on this landlocked łódź, this galley of slaves marooned in a bitter time. He likes to surprise lovers kissing in the grass. He photographs birthday parties and weddings. He takes family portraits. But most of all he enjoys photographing children. He follows their games, and despite the film shortage he can’t help but spend a whole roll on a single child.
A final section of the exhibition presents a wide selection of Ross’s portraits, including some taken in his official capacity. Printed as oversized contact images arranged in filmstrips lined one next to the other in columns of six to eight pictures, there are faces of children at play, some posing impishly; there are portraits of loving couples, and mothers adoring their little ones. These portraits, which Henryk Ross had kept hidden, perhaps because they seemed to be of no value as witnesses, capture sparks of life and happiness that resist against all odds.
Whether one strolls though the exhibition, or pores over the online archives, getting to know some faces intimately, matching children to their parents by comparing commissioned photos and family portraits, or looking helplessly at those who suffer, the nagging feeling returns again and again: there is something missing. Very few people — only a handful of ghetto officials — are identified by name; not even those who must have been Ross’s closest friends. Did Ross record their names after the war? While certain captions in the exhibition appear between quote marks, there is little evidence of Ross’s written documentation.
And yet we know that Ross tried to come to terms with the images. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an eighteen-page notebook into which Ross pasted contact images, sometimes singly, sometimes as filmstrips. All the pages are mounted behind Plexiglass, allowing the visitors to view them from either side. A number of the images are projected on a wall, while two interactive displays give access to a digitized, high-resolution version of the notebook, where one can pinch the images and enlarge them at will. Reproduced in full in the exhibition catalog, the notebook is examined at length in the accompanying essays, which devote considerable attention to Ross’s editorial selection and sequencing. For lack of any written record, the order of images is rather baffling: there is little or no attempt at chronology, some images are repeated in different contexts. Viewed as a whole, however, this meticulously composed album seems to be the image of a memory of images, each tangled in an intricate web of relations and correspondences. To read it, it may perhaps be necessary to call up the resources of dream analysis and archaeology, as much as art history and anthropology.
The exhibition’s exit leads through a small space furnished with artworks that resonate with Ross’s photographs, including a series of vintage postcards of the ruins of Warsaw. On the opposite wall, one’s eyes are drawn to a patch of color that contrasts with the black-and-white images. It’s a painting by J.M.W. Turner called The Slave Ship (1780), representing a storm-battered sail ship amid crashing breakers stained red with the light of the setting sun. In the foreground, one can distinguish arms, some still shackled, of 133 slaves thrown overboard as ballast.
Ela Kotkowska
Ela Kotkowska is a freelance writer, translator, and editor. She lives and works in New England.
Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross
March 25 to July 30, 2017
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115-5523
USA
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/memory-unearthed
Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross
Edited by Maia-Mari Sutnik, with contributions by Matthew Teitelbaum, Maia-Mari Sutnik, Michael Mitchell, Robert Jan Van Pelt, Eric Beck Rubin, and Bernice Eisenstein
Art Gallery of Ontario and Yale University Press, 2015
$40
Notes:
[1] The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941–1944, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki. Yale University Press, 1984.
[2] Encyklopedia Getta: Niedokończony Projekt Archiwistów z Getta Łódzkiego [The Ghetto Encyclopedia: An Unfinished Project by the Łódź Ghetto Archivists], ed. Krystyna Radziszewska et al. Wydawnictwo Uniwerystetu Łódzkiego, 2014.
[3] As recounted in a 1961 edition of an unidentified Polish newspaper on display in the exhibition (item 2007.2826).
[4] My Secret Camera: Life in the Łódź Ghetto. Photographs by Mendel Grossman, Text by Frank Dabba Smith. Ghetto Fighters’ House, 2000. Of the images taken by Grossman, 417 prints survived in archives collected by another survivor employed in the Archives, and Grossman’s close friend, Nachman Zonabend: Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence. I.B. Tauris, 2011, p. 93.
[5] Data collected by Julian Baranowski, “Szacunek zysków III Rzeszy z pracy przymusowej i grabienia mienia mieszkańców Getta Litzmannstadt” [Estimated Profits of the Third Reich from the Forced Labor and Pillaged Property of Litzmannstadt Ghetto Residents]. Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi.
[6] Incorrectly spelled “Czarnecki” in the exhibition. Albeit minor, misspellings, mainly of Polish street names (there are few proper names besides), plague the exhibition catalog and the wall labels (“Zigerska” street for Zgierska; “Kosielny” square for Koscielny; and so on)—a rather unfortunate, and easily avoidable, oversight.
[7] A reading of the photo provided by Antony Polonsky during his fascinating talk, “Łódź, A Jewish City,” given at the MFA on March 30, 2017.
[8] George Didi-Huberman, Images Malgré Tout. Les Éditions de Minuit, 2003, p. 57.
[9] Item 2007/2211, available on the AGO website, http://agolodzghetto.com/.
[10] A detailed chapter is devoted to the terrible devastation of the ghetto’s population in September 1942 by Gordon J. Horwitz in Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of Nazi City. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 192–231.
[11] The angle of the sun, as can be judged from the shadow cast across the side of the building, is roughly 40°, which, given the season, puts the time at about three o’clock in the afternoon.
