This week's hero is...
Henryk Ross
Henryk Ross was born on May 1, 1910 in Warsaw, Poland. For the early part of his life, Ross worked as a sports photographer for the Warsaw newspaper. Like most people around the world, he lived a normal life and made a decent living for his family. But all of that changed when the Nazis invaded Poland and World War II began.
The Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. In just over a month, the Polish government surrendered. By the end of the year, they already began passing anti-Jewish ordinances that were meant to strip away the rights of Poland's Jewish citizens (Ross and his family among them). Jews in Poland lost their homes, most of their possessions, and were forced to wear a yellow star in public. Eventually, they were forcefully relocated to "temporary" resettlement camps called, "ghettos".
Ross and his family were among 160,000 Jews who were forced to relocate to a large ghetto (second largest after the one in Warsaw) in the city of Lodz in May of 1940. The conditions inside the Lodz ghetto were deplorable. It was only about four square miles on the inside. It was closed off from the rest of the city and surrounded by barbed wire, walls, and heavily armed guards. The Jews inside the over-crowded ghetto began to starve on a daily basis.
Like most of prisoners in the ghetto, Ross tried to make the best of his situation. He managed to get a job as one of the official photographers in the ghetto. His job was to produce identity and take propaganda photographs for the Nazi Department of Statistics within the ghetto. This was done for the purpose of convincing the outside world (namely the Red Cross) that people inside the ghetto were being well-treated. In other words, they wanted Ross to help them hide the deplorable true conditions of the ghetto in Lodz. This also meant that Ross had access to film and processing facilities within the ghetto. He took photographs of weddings, happy workers, families, and children playing in the street. All the while being watched by the Nazi guards.
However, what the Nazis did not know was that Henryk Ross was secretly resisting them. Whenever he had the chance, Ross snapped photographs of the atrocities of the Lodz ghetto. He took photographs of starving workers, dying children in the street, public hangings, shootings, and beatings from the guards. Ross was even able to take photos of Jews being forced into cattle cars and taken to death camps. Sometimes he even shot pictures through holes in the walls or cracks in a door. He did this with great risk to himself and his family. If the Nazis found out that Ross was secretly working to expose their atrocities, he and his family would have been executed.
In the summer of 1944, the Nazis losing the war. It was then that they began to officially liquidate the Lodz ghetto. By this time, Henryk Ross had secretly taken more than 6,000 pictures of life in the ghetto. By now most of the Jews in the Lodz ghetto were either dead or deported to concentration camps. Ross knew that he and his family would eventually be deported or murdered, so he decided it was time to escape. Before leaving however, he decided to bury his pictures just in case he did not survive the war. He later said in an interview, "I buried my negatives in the ground in order to ensure that there should be some record of our tragedy. Namely, the total elimination of the Jews from Lodz by the Nazi executioners. I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom." After doing so, Ross and his family escaped from the ghetto and went into hiding. They managed to survive until Lodz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army.
It is estimated that a total of 45,000 Jewish people were murdered in the Lodz ghetto. Tens of thousands more were deported to death camps in Poland like Chelmno, Belzec, and Treblinka. Only around 877 (Henryk Ross included) survived their ordeal inside the ghetto of Lodz. Like many Holocaust survivors, Ross and his family immigrated to Israel and started a new life. A few years later though, he returned to Lodz and dug up the negatives that he had buried. Although many had been damaged over the years, others were still readable. Henryk Ross took them back to Israel and set them aside in his house for a bit. When Adolf Eichmann (one of the main architects of the Holocaust) was put on trial 1961, Ross was one of those to testify against him. It was there that he showed his remarkable photographs to the rest of the world. They were instrumental in getting Eichmann convicted.
Henryk Ross continued to live in Israel until his death in 1991, at the age of 81. As of today, Ross's photographs can be found in museums all around the world including: Israel's Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. They have been recognized as some of the most powerful and horrifying images of the Holocaust.
A genocide is basically the ultimate crime and ultimate tragedy of humanity. It is something that can never be ignored and never be forgotten. The courageous actions of Henryk Ross ensured that the Holocaust will always be remembered. He recognized the horrible reality that he had been thrown into and knew that the outside world needed to know the truth. So he chose to risk his life in order to take pictures and make sure the story of the Lodz ghetto would never be forgotten. His bravery in secretly resisting the Nazis right under their noses gave the victims of the Lodz ghetto a voice. I believe that Henryk Ross was one of the greatest men in history.
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/a-jewish-photographers-view-of-a-nazi-controlled-ghetto-henryk-ross/
http://agolodzghetto.com
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/newsletter/32/henryk_ross.asp
https://www.utata.org/sundaysalon/henryk-ross/
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