In March 1945 a man who had witnessed far too much human misery dug into ground hardened by the Polish winter and retrieved what he had buried months earlier. His name was Henryk Ross. He had been an official photographer in the ghetto that Nazi occupiers created in Łódź (['wut͡ɕ], "wootsch"), a city in the heart of Poland. There, in the first half of the 1940s, they walled off tens of thousands of Jews. Ross was one of them. Working for the ghetto’s Department of Statistics, he shot identification-card photos and took propaganda pictures of textile and leather factory workers. Unofficially, he recorded the devastating realities of ghetto life.
In the summer of 1944, as wartime defeat loomed for them, the Nazis began to liquidate the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest in their network of such zones, after the notorious one in Warsaw. Sensing that the end was near, Mr. Ross put 6,000 of his negatives in canisters, placed them in a wooden container lined with tar, and buried them by his house. On Jan. 19, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated the ghetto, by then a shell of its former self. The Nazis, ever meticulous, had conducted a census in June 1940 and counted 160,320 Jews. By the liberation, only 877 had survived, Henryk Ross among them. That March, he dug up his trove of visual testimony. About half of the 6,000 negatives had been ruined by moisture but enough of them survived to make good on Mr. Ross’s vow to “leave a historical record of our martyrdom” and to show how those who perished once lived.
The collection of pictures can be seen on the dedicated web site:
http://agolodzghetto.com