Lodz Ghetto Album [Hardcover]

I think this is a great book--I was there and it took me back to my childhood. My husband and I were liberated by the Russians in January 1945 after being slaves in the Ghetto. Most of our family perished and we soon left Poland and eventually came to America in 1949.

These photographs took me back 60 years to that life. In fact, it is possible that the photo of the young couple kissing is, in fact, my husband & I!

For anyone interested in what life in the Lodz Ghetto was really like, this is an excellent book.

A relatively new and important addition to Holocaust photography, Henryk Ross risked his life in order to document the daily indignities, inhumane hardships, and calculated murder of the Jews trapped in the Lodz Ghetto. Since some of my family survived this Nazi-created community, I've searched other Lodz Ghetto and Holocaust literature for decades, seeking any evidence of family I never had the chance to meet. Only in the extraordinarlly courageous work of Henryk Ross work did I finally discover some photos of relatives. From the mundane of everyday existence to the horrors of daily hangings, Ross proves, literally in black-and-white, what life was like under Nazi rule. I don't think any collection of Holocaust history is complete without this unique book. The book even includes Ross's testimony at the Eichmann trial in Israel; testimony that was impossible to mock or minimize because of his ingenious decision to bury his photographs during the war and retrieve them following liberation. It's too bad that Henryk Ross's work was not more internationally recognized before he died (I think in the 1970s). When I look at books in my collection now with photo credits photos from different museums, hundreds of these unattributed photographs are actually by Ross--a truly important photojournalist.

"Modern war tries to reduce all loyalties to one. But in real life there are many and war does not get rid of them: loyalties to family, nation, class ideology, army unit, generation, institutions, community all continue and indeed are often accentuated under pressure of war. The reality that war often brings to the fore is that these are frequently cross-cutting and sometimes competing loyalties." - Bernard Wasserstein, as quoted by Thomas Weber in `Lodz Ghetto Album'

Henryk Ross, whose photographic work has been thoughtfully compiled in this remarkable volume, knew all about competing loyalties. A Jewish Pole employed as a sportswriter, Ross was forced into the ghetto at Lodz in January 1940, where he was employed as an official photographer of the Department of Statistics by the Jewish council. There Ross had a unique opportunity to document the day-to-day suffering and deprivation, as well as the frequent horror of beatings, executions, and deportations, both by Nazi persecutors and the council-appointed Jewish ghetto police.

These horrors, so firmly ensconced in the historical understanding of ghetto life during the Holocaust, are all portrayed in `Lodz Ghetto Album,' in sobering and heartbreaking detail. Ross, who against all odds survived the war, often put his life in grave danger in order to document these moments. He is owed a debt of gratitude for his bravery in documenting, in his own words, the "martyrdom" of his people.

Less conveniently, Ross also left behind a very different sort of photographic record, essentially unseen before the publication of this book. These photographs show the other side of ghetto life, one enjoyed by the ghetto elite; Jewish council members, policemen, and other "people with more money," as Ross calls them. Scenes of birthday parties, children playing, and young romance belie Ross's position as a man suffering the same miseries as the ghetto's most vulnerable victims.

And yet, as Weber rightly points out, the undeniable fact is that almost everyone who appears in `Lodz Ghetto Album' died at the hands of the Nazis soon after their photograph was taken. A survival rate of 0.5% cannot discriminate significantly for class or social strata. That Wasserstein's "competing loyalties" not only forced the ghetto elite of Lodz to make impossible and horrible decisions, but that it only delayed their inevitable murders, is doubly tragic. We have Ross to thank for capturing this dichotomy with his camera, even as his position of trust with the elites seems to have borne negative consequences for his post-war personal life.

Weber's narrative is illuminating and thought-provoking, and is a creditable companion to Ross's extraordinary work. The only source of regret is that there is not more acknowledgement of the tens of thousands in Lodz to whom the impossible choices would never be presented, but who were immediately picked out for death.