The Art Gallery of Ontario recently launched an interactive digital archive of more than 4,000 rarely seen Holocaust images to mark the 70th anniversary of the physical unearthing of photographer Henryk Ross’s negatives from Poland’s Lodz Ghetto.
The Art Gallery of Ontario’s digital archive contains more than 4,000 photos of Poland’s Lodz Ghetto, taken by Henryk Ross.
The following are the opening paragraphs in the news release issued by the Art Gallery of Ontario.
August 19, 2015, Toronto — The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), in partnership with Facing History and Ourselves and the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, has developed a digital archive of more than 4,000 rarely seen images from its Henryk Ross Collection of Lodz Ghetto Photographs. Created for educators, students, scholars and others interested in the history of the Lodz Ghetto, the website, www.AGOLodzGhetto.com, features searchable, digital renderings of Henryk Ross’s original nitrate-based negatives. The launch of the digital archive marks the 70th anniversary of Ross’s physical unearthing of the original negatives in 1945.
The website offers an extraordinarily rare glimpse of life inside the Lodz Ghetto during the Second World War through the daring lens of Ross (1910-1991), a Polish Jewish photojournalist. Situated in the heart of Poland, the city of Lodz was occupied by German forces in 1939 and became the country’s second largest ghetto for the Jewish population of Europe, after Warsaw. Incarcerated in 1940 and put to work as a bureaucratic photographer by the Jewish Administration’s Statistics Department, Ross unofficially—and at great personal risk—took thousands of images of daily life in the ghetto.
As the last remaining ghetto residents were being sent to their deaths at Auschwitz, Ross hid his negatives. “I buried my negatives in the ground,” he said in 1987, “in order that there should be some record of our tragedy…I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom.” Ross and his wife, Stefania, were among a very small percentage of ghetto inhabitants to survive the war, and after the liberation of Lodz Ghetto in January 1945 he was able to excavate his negatives. Over half of his original 6,000 negatives survived, albeit with some damage, making his collection one of the largest visual records of its kind to survive the Holocaust.
Read the rest of the news release on the AGO website.
