120) Henryk Ross
Photographer in the Łódź Ghetto
Born: 1 May 1910, Warsaw, Poland
Died: 1 May 1991, Israel
Before the war he was a sports photographer for a local newspaper.
In May of 1940, Henryk was moved into the Ghetto on account of his Jewish heritage. He soon secured a posting as one of the official photographers within the ghetto.
Henryk was charged with producing propaganda photographs and identity pictures of those within the ghetto. Because he also had access to the processing equipment, he also photographed conditions to document what was going on within the ghetto. He managed to produce thousands of these photographs.
When the ghetto began to be liquidated in 1944, Henryk buried his photographs with the hopes of returning for them someday.
His pictures were later used as evidence and he himself testified in the Eichmann Trial in 1961. Henryk’s complete collection became available in 1997, six years after his death, when his son made them public knowledge. However, despite this, his pictures remain almost unknown.
The reason for this is because his pictures cover everything from the atrocities being committed against the Jews, to the more awkward things to admit, like the Jewish Police force within the ghetto and children playing games like Police and Jew.
In 2004, Robert Jan Van Pelt published a book based on Henry’s photographs. The second source listed will show you over 400 of them.
Sources:
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/the-jewish-photographer-henryk-ross.html