Lodz Ghetto photos -- my article

Downtown Lodz today

The Jewish Quarterly publishes my review of the book Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross, a fascinating collection of posed photographs and unexpected snapshots taken in the WW2 Lodz Ghetto and hidden underground until after the war.


By Ruth Ellen Gruber

June 22, 2015

The extraordinary images reprinted in Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross are survivors, both physical and symbolic.

Ross, born in Warsaw in 1910, was one of the more than 200,000 Jews imprisoned in the World War II Lodz ghetto. Thanks to his background as a photo-journalist, he was appointed to a privileged position—an official photographer for the Statistics Office of the Ghetto’s Jewish Council (Judenrat).

He worked in that capacity from 1940 to 1945, taking thousands of photographs that documented the widest possible range of ghetto life—and death.

On the one hand, his official work produced everything from ID portraits and group photos of ghetto police, to Potemkin village-like shots of ghetto inmates, smiling at their benches as they laboured in Council-run workshops, or “resorts”, including those that employed young children.

But he turned his lens, too, on other scenes far outside the purview of propaganda—scenes of violence and mass deportations, scenes of murder and malnutrition, scenes of death. Often taken on the sly, from a camera hidden under his coat, these images are chilling but almost familiar in the Holocaust horror they depict.

Ross, though, also immortalized intensely personal moments that put the death, destruction and degradation in a much more intimate, even unlikely, context: kids at play, a smiling bride at her ghetto wedding, friends clowning, a couple stealing a kiss.

Ross, who survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel after the war, knew just what he was doing and just what he wanted to do.

“Having an official camera, I was secretly able to photograph the life of the Jews in the ghetto,” he wrote in 1987, four years before his death. “Just before the closure of the ghetto in 1944, I buried my negatives in the ground in order that there should be some record of our tragedy, namely the total elimination of the Jews from Lodz by the Nazi executioners. I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom.”

In January 1945, after the Red Army liberated the ghetto, he went back and dug up what he had hidden. Fewer than 3,000 of the 6,000 negatives he had buried survived intact; others were severely damaged from seven months under ground.

But by bringing them back to light, he brought them, and what they represented, back to life. Ross unearthed not only shadowy strips of celluloid; he unearthed direct testimony to the cruelty of life inside the ghetto, and direct testimony, too, to life itself – the lives lived by ghetto inmates, intimate glimpses of humanity side by side with the horror.

    …Continue reading

Poland -- Travel story on Lodz

Artur Rubinstein street sculpture monument. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The New York Jewish Week runs a lively travel story by Hilary Larson on Lodz, Poland, highlighting the city's Jewish heritage as well as its new spaces and places -- which include Manufaktura, a big shopping center in the transformed red-brick factory that was once run by Lodz's wealthiest Jewish industrialist, I.K. Poznanski...

This onetime outpost of the Russian and German Empires was among the world’s most Jewish cities before the Holocaust, with a quarter-million Jews, a good third of the city’s total. Every year, thousands of heritage travelers come to bear witness to Lodz’s wartime ghetto and the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. 

So fixed is that mournful image that it takes a mental leap to consider what Europeans already know: Lodz is suddenly the coolest place in Poland. 

“It’s where all the hipsters and artists are going,” said my Polish friend Piotr. “They are in Warsaw for the jobs, in Krakow for the universities. But they come to Lodz for the scene.” [...]

This so-called “City of Four Cultures” (Polish, Jewish, German and Russian) is polyglot and full of surprises. There are 19th-century Orthodox churches, baroque Teutonic mansions, Soviet housing blocks with underground cafes. Though Jews are few today, Jewishness continues to pervade the city — a subtle but persistent overlay of nostalgia, and a belatedly appreciated cultural influence.

I'm glad to see Lodz get such coverage. I have always greatly enjoyed my visits to the city and walks down ruler-straight Piotrkowski street, looking at the old mansions and the street sculpture of Rubinstein, Tuwim and others.

Piortrkowski st. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber)

Larson doesn't mention however, two of the key Jewish and "Jewish" sights..... the large and fascinating Jewish cemetery, with Poznanski's immense domed tomb, and the "Jewish" restaurant Anatewka, which, since I first saw it, has been one of the Platonic ideals for me of the "virtually Jewish world"..... where, the first time I visited, in 2005, the waiters were dressed as Hasids, and where guests are (or were) all given little figurines of Jews clutching coins as sort of favors.

Poland - art and memory. Page of History Foundation

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I have to admit that I had never heard of the Page of History Foundation and its interesting project linking art and commemoration  until I read a recent  article in the Jewish Chronicle about an art work it just unveiled in the town of Gora Kalwaria (Yiddish Ger) south of Warsaw -- a sculpture depicting Adam and Eve by the Polish artist Bronislaw Krzysztof.

The year was 1990, Communism had just collapsed in Poland and John Pomian, a Pole living in the UK, was on a return visit to his country of origin with a Jewish friend, Casimir Stamirski.

As the pair passed through the town of Mogielnica, Mr Pomian, who served in the RAF during the war, was invited by Mr Stamirski to stop off in the town to see they could find any traces of the Jewish community that once thrived there.

There was nothing to be found. As they returned to their car, they spotted a large boulder bearing the names of locals who died during the Second World War. There were no Jewish names among them.

On his return to London, Mr Pomian decided something had to be done to commemorate the presence of Jews in Poland, who, he says, "have shared our history for centuries". In 1991, Mr Pomian set up the Page of History Foundation, which aimed to install works of art in towns where Jews once lived as gestures of remembrance "from Poles towards Polish Jews".

 Read full article HERE

The foundation's web site describes its purpose as commemorating the Jewish presence in Poland "through funding works of art authored by recognized artists and making these available to a wider public."

It states that the Foundation's four basic principles are:

--  this is to be a Polish gesture towards the Jews, who shared our history for centuries and made their contribution to the development of Polish culture and commercial life.

--  this is to be a completely private undertaking and we will not be seeking any money from public funds.

--  we will commemorate Polish Jews through works of art of the highest and lasting aesthetic merit.

-- the inspiration for these works will be the Old Testament, which is the sacred scripture of both Christians and Jews.

Besides in Gora Kalwaria, works of art have been put up since 1995 in Warsaw, Szydlow, Lodz and Zamosc.