I Buried My Negatives in the Ground...
By: Chloe Coleman, Washington Post
‘I buried my negatives in the ground in order that there should be some record of our tragedy.' The photographs of Henryk Ross.
Officially, former Polish press photojournalist Henryk Ross was forced to work by the Nazi regime as a bureaucratic photographer for the Jewish Administration's statistics department. He took photographs for Jewish identification cards, as well as images used as propaganda for the Lodz Ghetto. Ross, a Jew, was one of at least 160,000 people held in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, second only to the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Europe.
Unofficially, at great personal danger, Ross documented the cruel truth of life under Nazi rule. In the four-year existence of the Lodz Ghetto, a quarter of its prisoners died of starvation. In 1942, nearly 20,000 were deported to the death camp of Chelmno; in 1944, 70,000 were sent to Auschwitz.
An exhibition, “Memory Unearthed,” organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, presents more than 200 of Ross’s photographs. It is on view in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts from March 25 to July 30.