Henryk Ross was a Polish Jewish photographer who documented life and death inside the Łódź ghetto from 1940 to 1944, then buried his negatives in the ground so the record would survive even if he did not. He dug them up after the Red Army freed Łódź in January 1945. About half of the roughly 6,000 negatives had been ruined by water; nearly 3,000 surviving images are now held by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
Ross was a press and sports photographer before the war. Inside the ghetto he worked for the statistics department of the Jewish administration, taking identity photographs and official pictures meant to show an orderly, productive workforce. On the side, at great risk, he photographed what the official pictures left out: hunger, forced labour and the deportations that sent most of the ghetto's people to their deaths. He said he wanted to leave a record of the destruction of Polish Jewry, and later testified as a witness at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
The photographs below, grouped by theme, show both sides of that record: weddings and smiling children, and the trains, carts and barbed wire that ended those lives.
The Łódź ghetto in brief
Germany occupied Łódź in September 1939 and annexed it to the Reich. The order to create a ghetto was issued in December 1939, and on 1 May 1940 the ghetto was sealed with about 164,000 people inside. It was run day to day by a Jewish council under Chaim Rumkowski, who bet that a hard-working ghetto producing goods for the German war effort would be spared.
It was not. From December 1941 trains took residents to the Chełmno extermination camp, where they were murdered in gas vans. In September 1942 the Germans demanded the children, the old and the sick. In the summer of 1944 the ghetto was liquidated, with the last transports going to Chełmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau. When Soviet troops arrived in January 1945, only a few hundred Jews were still alive there, Ross among them, kept back as part of a clean-up crew.
Family life behind the wire
1940–1944: Portrait of a couple
Two frames from the same roll show a young couple posing in a doorway, smiling for the camera. Ross took many private portraits like this for people who wanted to keep a memory of each other. The negative numbers along the edge are a reminder that these are working film strips, not polished prints.
1940–1944: A smiling child
A small girl smiles out from a ring of damaged emulsion. The ragged white edges are water damage from the months the negative spent underground. It is one of the most reproduced images in the collection, partly because the damage itself has become part of the story.
1940–1942: Woman with her child, a ghetto policeman's family
A mother holds a baby wrapped in white outside a wooden house. Families of the ghetto's Jewish police received somewhat better rations and protection than most residents, at least for a time. Ross photographed people across the ghetto's social range, including those who held small privileges.
1940–1944: Young girl
A little girl in a light coat stands in the grass, the star sewn onto her clothing clearly visible. Jews in the ghetto were forced to wear the yellow star on chest and back. The everyday pose makes the badge all the more jarring.
1940–1944: A wedding in the ghetto
A bride in a veil stands beside her groom, both looking towards the camera. Weddings went on in the ghetto despite hunger and fear, and Ross was among those who recorded them. For many couples, his pictures are the only trace of the day.
1940–1944: A boy in a doorway swing
A toddler laughs in a wooden baby swing hung in a doorway. Scenes like this show what families tried to protect inside cramped rooms. Very few children of the Łódź ghetto survived the war.
1940–1944: Young girl among the greenery
A teenage girl looks out from a thick screen of leaves. The ghetto's Marysin district had gardens and green spaces, and some young people worked or spent time there. The image could almost pass for a summer snapshot anywhere.
1940–1944: Children looking out the window
Three girls lean together in an open window, smiling. The ghetto was fenced and guarded, so for children a window was often the widest view of the world they had. Their names are not recorded on the negative.
1940–1944: A Jewish policeman with his wife and child in Marysin
A uniformed ghetto policeman poses with his wife and their baby in a garden in Marysin. The Jewish police were used by the ghetto administration to keep order and later to help carry out deportations, which made them deeply resented. Ross photographed them as people too, with their families.
Hunger, work and food
1940–1944: A boy searching for food
A boy kneels in churned earth, scraping into a bowl. Starvation was the ghetto's constant condition: official rations were far below what a body needed, and tens of thousands died of hunger and disease before any deportation. Ross photographed people digging for scraps of vegetables and peelings.
1940: Baking flat bread
Bakers in white aprons hold up rounds of flat bread beside an oven, while a man works below at the fire. Bread was the most precious ration in the ghetto, distributed by the administration and fought over in the queues. A loaf had to last a person many days.
1940–1944: "Soup for lunch"
A row of men sits against a wall eating from metal pails. Workers in the ghetto factories received a bowl of thin soup during their shift, and for many it was the main meal of the day. That soup was one reason people fought to keep a work card.
1940–1944: A nurse feeding children in an orphanage
A nurse spoons food to a small child at a table in an orphanage. The ghetto ran children's homes, many in Marysin, for the growing number of orphans. In September 1942 children under ten were among those the Germans demanded for deportation.
1940–1944: Removal of waste by men and women workers
Men and women strain to push a cart carrying a large barrel. Much of the ghetto area had no sewer system, so human waste had to be collected and hauled away by hand. It was one of the hardest and most dangerous jobs, given to people with few other options.
1940–1944: Delivery of potatoes to the ghetto
A young man rests his arms on a huge pile of potatoes. Food entered the ghetto only through the German authorities, and deliveries were often late, too small or partly spoiled. A shipment like this was something to celebrate.
1942: Men hauling a cart for bread distribution
With no horses or fuel to spare, men harnessed themselves to carts to move bread around the ghetto. Ross shows them leaning into the ropes on a cobbled street. Human-powered transport was a common sight in his pictures.
The ruined synagogue and the ghetto boundary
1940: A man who saved the Torah from the synagogue on Wolborska Street
A man walks away from the camera carrying a Torah scroll in his arms. The synagogue on Wolborska Street, one of the city's important Jewish houses of prayer, was destroyed by the Germans in November 1939. Rescuing a scroll from its rubble was an act of faith and of defiance.
1940: A man walking in winter through the synagogue ruins
A lone figure crosses snow-covered rubble, with a broken wall still showing its decorative carving. This is the full frame of the image used at the top of this article. The ruins remained a visible wound in the ghetto for years.
1940–1944: Woman sitting in the ruins of the synagogue
A woman sits among broken bricks where the synagogue once stood, with others picking through the rubble behind her. Residents salvaged wood and other material for fuel and building. The image echoes the winter scene, years later and in a different season.
1940–1944: Sign for the Jewish residential area
A sign by the fence reads, in German, "Jewish residential area. Entry forbidden." The ghetto was cut off from the rest of the city by fences and guards, and leaving without permission could be punished by death. The neutral-sounding wording hid what the area really was.
Deportations
1940–1942: Ghetto prison on Czarnecki Street
Men press against a wire fence outside the ghetto's central prison on Czarnecki Street. The prison served as a holding point where people were gathered before deportation. Ross's view through the wire captures the crowd from inside the fear.
1940–1944: Deportation in winter
People walk down a snowy street carrying bundles and sacks. Deportees were told they were being resettled for work and allowed to bring only small amounts of luggage. Most of those sent from Łódź were murdered on arrival.
1942: Children being transported to Chełmno
An open cart loaded with passengers rolls down a city street while a man walks behind. In 1942 transports took tens of thousands of ghetto residents to Chełmno nad Nerem, which the Germans renamed Kulmhof, the first camp to use gas for mass killing. In September 1942 alone the Germans demanded thousands of children.
1942: Evacuation of the sick
A woman cries out as men struggle with patients and bundles in a crowded street. In 1942 the ghetto's hospitals were emptied and the sick were deported, a scene this image appears to belong to. It is one of Ross's most direct records of the violence of the deportations.
1940–1944: A sick man on the ground
A man lies on the cobblestones while others stand or sit nearby. Illness, cold and starvation left people collapsing in the streets. Passers-by often had no strength or means to help.
1940–1944: Women walking past the synagogue ruins towards deportation
A line of women carrying sacks and pails moves past a mound of rubble. Ross captured them mid-stride, faces turned towards the photographer. The pails they carry were often the only cooking vessels they owned.
1942: Police with a woman behind barbed wire
A woman in dark clothes stands behind barbed wire as a uniformed policeman watches. The fence, the guard and her calm expression make this one of the quietest and most unsettling pictures in the set. Her fate is unknown.
1944: Food pails and dishes left behind by deported residents
A courtyard is covered with abandoned pails, bowls and pots. When the ghetto was liquidated in 1944, deportees were forced to leave their belongings. These dishes stand in for the tens of thousands of people who used them.
1940–1944: Skulls and bones on the ground
Human skulls and bones lie scattered on bare earth. The negative is dated only to the ghetto years and its exact location is not recorded. It is one of the starkest records in Ross's archive of the mass death that the ghetto and the deportations brought.
The photographer at work, and after
1940: Ross photographing for identification cards
Ross, apparently the man at the camera on the right, photographs a group of people seated on a tiered stand, each holding a number. According to accounts of his work, this arrangement let him fit up to twelve faces on one negative, which saved film he could then use for his secret pictures. It shows his official job and his quiet resistance in a single frame.
1945: Ross excavating his hidden box of negatives
A small crowd watches as Ross digs in the ground where he had buried his archive. He recovered the box in March 1945, and found much of the material damaged by groundwater. What survived became one of the most important photographic records of a Nazi ghetto.
1945: Three men after liberation by the Red Army
Three young men pose arm in arm, smiling, after Soviet troops entered Łódź on 19 January 1945. Only a few hundred Jews were found alive in the ghetto that day. For the survivors, liberation came with the knowledge that most of their families were gone.
Why the buried negatives matter
Ross's archive is valuable precisely because it was made by an insider who saw both the official image of the ghetto and its reality. A smiling portrait taken here is not evidence that conditions were bearable: it records one moment inside a system of confinement, starvation and, finally, mass murder. Reading the pictures with their dates and context is part of honouring the people in them.
After the war Ross and his wife Stefania, whom he had married in the ghetto in 1941, emigrated to Israel in 1950. He died in 1991. In 2007 his collection came to the Art Gallery of Ontario as a gift from the Archive of Modern Conflict, and the gallery's 2015 exhibition Memory Unearthed later travelled, including to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York in 2018.
For more on why this history matters today, see our articles on genocide recognition and the Holocaust and on photographs that serve as memorials.
Sources: Photographs by Henryk Ross, collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario: Memory Unearthed; Museum of Jewish Heritage press release (2018); Wikipedia: Henryk Ross; Wikipedia: Łódź Ghetto.
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