After the Soviets liberated the Polish city of Lodz in 1945, photographer Henryk Ross returned to the spot where, in 1944, he had buried 6,000 of his film negatives documenting the life and death of the city’s Jewish population.
During the German occupation of Lodz, the Nazis, as they had in Warsaw, sealed off the Jewish population, permitting them no exit and non-Jews no entrance. The Nazis immediately put the Nuremberg Laws governing “racial purity” into effect, and also set up a self-policing Jewish Administration, which was in turn overseen by the punctilious bureaucrats of the Third Reich.
Ross had been hired by the Administration’s statistics department to take both identity card photos and propaganda pictures of the men, women and children of the Ghetto who were forced into slave labor.
Ross’s work is now on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the exhibition “Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross,” which was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada, where the entire Ross archive is housed.
Of the 6,000 negatives Ross buried in canisters, about half survived, although some showed the damage you would expect from prolonged exposure to the earth. The exhibition shows more than 200 of Ross’s photographs, some in the form of vintage prints but most as modern reprints, as well as a portion of the original contact sheets.
There is also miscellaneous material associated with the administration of the ghetto: flyers, stamps, currency, posters, postcards and increasingly draconian warnings from the Jewish Administration to obey without question their edicts, or else risk instant death.
As part of his job, Ross was asked to depict the Lodz Ghetto as a kind of Potemkin village. Look, the pictures would proclaim, conditions here, while not luxurious, are tolerable, particularly for a city under occupation.
See the people at work making hats and mattresses and tanning leather. They are fed, they get medical attention, they still fall in love, marry and give birth. They have their own postage and currency. They still make bread, and they even have vegetable gardens, although their scarecrows wear coats with the Star of David sewed on the breast pocket. Does this look so dreadful to you?
What Ross’s employers in the Jewish Administration didn’t know was that, surreptitiously and at great personal risk, he was also documenting the deteriorating conditions within the ghetto during its four years of existence from 1940 to its liquidation in 1944, when the Germans deported the majority of the population to the death camps at Chelmno and Auschwitz.
According to the multi-volume Lodz-Names: List of the Ghetto Inhabitants, 1940-1944, co-published by Yad Vashem in Israel and the Organization of Former Residents of Lodz in Israel (OFRLI), the pre-war population of Jews in Lodz was around 220,000.
Once the Ghetto was established in 1940, it housed some 160,000 Jews from Lodz as well as Jews who had been rounded up from provincial Polish cities. Later in the war, the Ghetto swelled to include Jews who had been transported there from other European countries. Taking into account deaths from starvation and disease, shootings and the final liquidation in August 1944, the death toll was in the area of 190,000. The official record of surviving Lodz Jews, who had gone into hiding during the liquidation, numbered 877.
After the war, Ross and his wife, Stefania, having miraculously survived the liquidation, immigrated to Israel, where they both eventually testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Final Solution, in 1961.
In a short film at the beginning of the MFA exhibition, Ross demonstrates how he snuck photos when people weren’t looking, hiding his camera under his coat and shooting from chest level so he didn’t draw attention to himself by bringing the camera up to his face.
Ross died in 1991 at the age of 81, after having published in the 1960s the book The Last Journey of the Jews of Lodz. He donated his collection to the Archive of Modern Conflict in London, which later presented it to the Art Gallery of Ontario, according to the New York Times.
Ross’s intention was clear: “I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom,” he said after the war.
The exhibition does just that, although if you examine the full digital archive of Ross’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s website (agolodzghetto.com), you realize just how many ghastly photographs were left out, perhaps because they were deemed too graphic, even for a modern audience habituated to violence and suffering on their TV and movie screens.
Despite the omission of such photographs there’s a stark, unrelenting realism here, a documentation of an inexorable downward spiral that is profoundly more disturbing than anything you will ever see in feature films, or even in the best photojournalism.
I think that’s because Ross was both a witness and a putative victim, which gives his work a different cast from that of a photojournalist who can, in most cases, jump into a dangerous situation and get out again. Ross not only observed it, he lived it, week after week, year after year.
This gives his photographs a sense of irony and dread that could come only from his understanding of how tenuous the margins of survival were.
People dug in garbage dumps for whatever food they could find, were made to cart away barrels of feces, fell dead on the streets. Their bodies were dumped like so much refuse in the morgue.
It is in the last gallery that you see the photos that Ross, hiding in a storage shed at the Lodz train station, took as lines of women, men and children, their belongings in hand, are funneled between high fences to the cattle cars.
You’ve seen such images before, but what makes a journey through Ross’s chronologically arranged photographs so sobering is seeing how the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto, day by day, hour by hour, were calmly and methodically stripped of their dignity and humanity — even as they try desperately to cling to normalcy and life. The vise tightens by degrees. Life narrows and narrows until there is only death.
And what a jolting reminder it is to see how swiftly and efficiently government bureaucracy was put into the service of annihilation.
It’s a pattern that, with variations, has been repeated in the decades since: in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Chechnya, and now Syria.
So why does it matter that we see these 75-year-old images, apart from the old adage about forgetting the lessons of history and then being condemned to repeat them?
It matters because democracies are not infinitely resilient. People will find rationales to do things to each other in their own nation that they would condemn when done elsewhere.
Americans don’t have to look too far into their own history to see evidence of that: the persecution of German-Americans in World War I, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the laws and legacy of Jim Crow, and now the threat of drawing up registries of Muslims.
Most Americans believe, and perhaps with good reason, that what happened in the Lodz Ghetto could never happen here. It seems unlikely, on the face of it.
Doesn’t the American systems of checks and balances militate against such an outcome? Isn’t our judicial system a bulwark against tyranny? Aren’t Americans too fractious and unruly to acquiesce in the face of dictatorial monstrousness?
But, what “Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross” tells you is that when a government wants to devise a mechanism by which it can control a population, it can do so with more ease than you’d like to acknowledge.
There is one grace note in Ross’s unrelenting depiction of the degradation to which his fellow citizens were subjected.
On a wall facing the deportation photographs is an arrangement of portraits that Ross shot in the earlier stages of the occupation. Here you see his artfulness, and ability to make his subjects comfortable. There were moments of levity and happiness, although circumstance would seem to dictate otherwise.
Mothers embrace their children, husbands and wives kiss, toddlers play in the grass, and in a series of pictures a young man and woman celebrate their marriage with a horse-drawn carriage ride.
We know looking at them that, eventually, most of them will be killed, but for the space of a few moments Ross brought out their humanity, their individuality, their humor and resilience, and their love for each other.
That is as honorable and enduring a legacy as Ross’s record of their destruction.
“Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross” continues at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston through July 30. For more information go to mfa.org/exhibitions/memory-unearthed.
Openings and Receptions
As Easter approaches, it can mean only thing. No, not what you’re thinking. We refer to the sixth annual Peeps Diorama contest that goes on view Friday at the Library Arts Center in Newport. Winners of the first, second and third prizes will be announced Friday with a public reception from 5 to 6:30 p.m. All the dioramas will be on display in the gallery through Saturday, April 22.
Also on view at the LAC, through May 26, is an exhibition of artwork by students in the Newport public school system.
Ongoing
Arabella, Windsor. The gallery exhibits works by local artists and artisans in a variety of media, including jewelry, oils, acrylics, photography, watercolors, pastels and textiles.
ArtisTree Gallery, South Pomfret. “MUD,” a show in which artists play variations on the theme of mud season, runs through May 6.
Center for the Arts, New London. The center shows work by Penny Koburger at the New London Inn, and pastels and oils by Gwen Nagel at the Lake Sunapee Bank on Main Street. In celebration of Youth Art Month, work by students from New London Elementary School also is on view at the Whipple Gallery in New London. All three shows end April 29.
Converse Free Library, Lyme. Lyme artist and printer Matt Brown exhibits “Woodblock Prints: Parts and Process” in the Betty Grant Gallery through May 31.
Hood Downtown, “World Processor,” an exhibition of illuminated globes by Ingo Gunther, runs through May 28. In a related exhibition,“Mining Big Data: Luis Delgado-Qualtrough and Amy Balkin” continues in the Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center, through April 30.
Hopkins Center, Hanover. Paintings by still-life artist Susan Walp are on view in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery through April 30.
Howe Library, Hanover. Boston artist Tatiana Yanovskaya-Sink, who also spends time in the summer in the Sunapee area, exhibits paintings in the library’s Ledyard Gallery through May 3.
Kilton Library, West Lebanon. A selection of work from Mount Lebanon School students will be on view through May.
Long River Gallery and Gifts, White River Junction. Lyme artist Stephanie Reininger exhibits “Spring’s Flowers and Colors” through May 5. For more information go to tinyurl.com/firstfridaylongriver.
Main Street Museum, White River Junction. “Theoretical Clothing and The Shape of Being,” an exhibition of clothing design, photography and sculpture by H. Seano Whitecloud, runs through April 22. On April 22, Whitecloud, along with other designers, will show his clothes as part of WRJ Fashion Weekend at the Engine Room in White River Junction.
Norwich Public Library. “Odanaksis: Plein Air Paintings,” an exhibition of work by artists Anne Webster Grant, Gail M. Barton, Helen Elder, Susan Rump, Linda Landry, Jo Tate and Becky Cook continues through May 26. See a related exhibition at the Zollikofer Gallery at the Hotel Coolidge (see below).
Osher at Dartmouth, Hanover. Lyme artist and illustrator Meg McLean exhibits her oil paintings in the show “Still Seeing Green” through April 27. The gallery is at the Osher office at 7 Lebanon Street, Hanover. Office hours are Monday through Thursday, 8:30 to 4:30 p.m., Fridays from 8:30 to 1 p.m.
Philip Read Memorial Library, Plainfield. Prints by Barnard artist Sabra Field are on view through July 1.
Royalton Memorial Library, South Royalton. A show of work by South Royalton School students continues through Friday. There will be a public reception today from 4 to 6 p.m.
Scavenger Gallery, White River Junction. The works of printmaker Lois Beatty and sculptor and wood worker Ria Blaas are on view, in addition to the jewelry of Stacy Hopkins.
SculptureFest, Woodstock. The annual celebration of three-dimensional art generally ends when foliage season does, but 80 percent of the show is still on view. “Grounding,” a show of site-specific work curated by sculptors Jay Mead and Edythe Wright, is on view at the King Farm. For more information, go to sculpturefest.org.
Tunbridge Public Library. “Adventures in Weaving,” a show by Braintree, Vt. artist Susan Rockwell runs through May 19.
Two Rivers Printmaking Studio, White River Junction. “Collaborations,” a show of prints by Vicky Tomayko and Bert Yarborough, is up through April 30.
White River Gallery at BALE, South Royalton. “Expansions,” a show of paintings by Jasper Tomkins, is on view through April 30.
Zollikofer Gallery, Hotel Coolidge, White River Junction. “The Spirit of Odanaksis,” an exhibition of work by members of a group Upper Valley plein air painters, is on view through May 10.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.