Lodz Ghetto Album

Henryk Ross was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1910, becoming a sports and general press photographer in Lodz before World War II. As a Jew, he was incarcerated in the Lodz ghetto by the Germans where he became one of two official photographers, producing identity and propaganda photographs for its Department of Statistics. His duties afforded him access to film and processing facilities and he used these to create a record of the ghetto, risking his life to secretly document the deportations, hangings and other atrocities. As the Germans began the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944, he buried his archive of 3,000 negatives and other ghetto records for safekeeping. Surviving the Holocaust (as a member of the ghetto clean-up squad intact at the time the Red Army liberated Lodz), he was able to recover the archive after the war. From his post-war home in Israel, where he worked as a photographer and zincographer, he circulated images showing the horrors of Lodz, including in his 1960s book The Last Journey of the Jews of Lodz and at the trial of the Holocaust-mastermind, Adolf Eichmann. He catalogued his photographs in 1987. Ross died in Israel in 1991.Ross, Henryk is the author of 'Lodz Ghetto Album', published 2004 under ISBN 9780954281373 and ISBN 0954281373.