The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross

Photography as Memory

After the war, Ross distributed selected photographs from his postwar home in Israel: some of these were published in his book The Last Journey of the Jews of Lodz (1960s); others were submitted as evidence in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. However, many of Ross’s images were never printed and few have been widely seen.

Ross captured searing images of the trauma of the Holocaust—families starving and painful deportations—but also consoling moments—children playing, people posing, dinner parties, and even celebration. Taken together, this collection reveals the everyday life and struggle of a community under incomprehensible circumstances. It is a complex portrait of life in the ghetto.