The Last Journey of the Jews of Lodz

Together with Memory Unearthed at the Portland Art Museum, this exhibition offers an extraordinarily rare glimpse of life inside the Lodz Ghetto through the lens of Polish Jewish photojournalist Henryk Ross (1910–1991). The exhibitions provide a visual and emotional meditation on a harrowing moment in history and pointing to the power of the photographic medium. 

Situated in the heart of Poland, the city of Lodz was occupied by German forces in 1939. The Nazis consolidated the area’s Jewish population—more than 160,000 people—into a poor industrial section of the city, sealing it off from the outside world and making the Lodz Ghetto second in population only to the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Europe. During its four years of operation, a quarter of its inhabitants died of starvation, while most were deported to concentration and death camps. Upon liberation by the Red Army in 1945, only 877 Jews remained alive in Lodz Ghetto.

Henryk Ross, confined to the ghetto in 1940, was put to work by the Nazi regime as a bureaucratic photographer for the Jewish Administration’s Statistics department. He took official photographs for Jewish identification cards, as well as images used as propaganda that promoted the ghetto’s efficiency. Unofficially—and at great risk—Ross documented the brutal realities of life under Nazi rule, culminating in the deportation of thousands to death camps at Chelmno and Auschwitz. Hoping to preserve a historical record, Ross buried his negatives in 1944. He returned for them after Lodz’s liberation, discovering that more than half of the original 6,000 survived. He spent the remainder of his life working with the images to tell his story of the Lodz Ghetto. 

Organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Whether or not you go, the companion publication, Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross  presents a selection of the nearly 3,000 surviving images—along with original prints and other archival material including curfew notices and newspapers—from the permanent collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Ross’s images offer a startling and moving new representation of one of humanity’s greatest tragedies. Striking for both their historical content and artistic quality, his photographs have a raw intimacy and emotional power that remain undiminished.

Select Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross to learn more, or to place this book in your Amazon shopping cart. Your Amazon purchase through this link generates a small commission that will help to fund the ArtGeek.art search engine.