Children of the ghetto. Playing as ghetto policemen. ©Archive of Modern Conflict, 2004

Humanity and horror intermingle in the historically compelling clandestine photographs taken by Henryk Ross of life in the Lodz ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1940 to 1945. Many of Ross’s images have became iconic statements of Holocaust brutality, but the range of his work, which has never before been seen at an American venue, challenges our understanding of the structure of the Lodz ghetto itself.

Availability:  February 2007 through June 2008

Rental fee:  $5,000 for 12 weeks plus one-way shipping

Objects:

     51 framed photographs

     42 framed photographs at 24" x 19"

     8 framed photographs at 30" x 23"

     1 framed photograph at 48" x 36"

Text and label panels included

25 catalogues, with option of purchasing additional catalogues to sell

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. The Lodz ghetto functioned both as a sweatshop serving the German war effort and as 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 Nazi orders, believing that the value of Lodz’s labor might secure survival for the majority.

History proved him decisively wrong: 95% of the ghetto’s 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 ghetto’s Department of Statistics. At considerable risk to his own life, he kept a clandestine photographic diary of ghetto life in powerful and often brilliant images. When the ghetto’s liquidation began, he buried the negatives. As a survivor after the war, he dug up some 3,000 negatives. Many that he released during his lifetime became icons of the Holocaust’s atrocities, but only a fraction were published before Ross’s death in 1991. In that same year, his archive – the most extensive collection of ghetto photographs by any single photographer – was acquired by the Archive of Modern Conflict in London.

Lodz Ghetto Album: Clandestine Photographs of Ghetto Life and the accompanying book, Lodz Ghetto Album (Chris Boot, 2004), provide the first independent look at the entirety of Ross’s ghetto photographs. Many of the "public" images are what we expect: searing documents of the machinery of the Holocaust and the suffering of its victims.

But other "private" photographs are available for the first time, revealing “life in the ghetto, with happiness sometimes,” as Ross states in his catalog. These scenes show aspects of “privileged” life in the ghetto – lovers in the park, children’s birthday parties, bodybuilders posing for the camera. Most troubling are photographs of the milieu of the ghetto police, including parties, Rumkowski’s chief of police with his rabbits, and a fat boy dressed in a ghetto police outfit "playing" at herding other children in the manner of a deportation. Those photographs have only been available in publication since 2004 and have not been exhibited in the United States.

Together with the public photographs, and the knowledge that almost everyone depicted perished in the Holocaust’s gas vans and chambers, these new images add an unexpected, complex and poignant dimension to the photographic record of the Lodz ghetto. And they demand a reassessment of how we understand its social order .

The Breman presents Lodz Ghetto Album: Clandestine Photographs of Ghetto Life as part of its mission to teach about respect for difference, community building, and responsible citizenship.

The Breman is U.S. agent for the exhibition, which is based on the Henryk Ross Collection of Lodz ghetto photography held by the Archive of Modern Conflict, London.

For more information, please contact Jennifer Campbell, Director of Special Exhibitions, by e-mail, or by phone at 404-870-1871.

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