(Jewish Group)Jewish prisoner's photos depicting horrid life in Lodz Ghetto donated to Boston museum
Henryk Ross risked his life to take surreptitious photographs of the brutal life in Poland’s Lodz Ghetto.
Now a cache of nearly 50 of those photos taken by the Jewish prisoner has been donated to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston by a collector, Howard Greenberg. They are the first Ross photographs in the museum’s collection and among the few owned by a U.S. museum.
One of the rare images captures a pensive-looking Jewish woman carrying satchels around her shoulders in a crowd of other Jews. Another is a chilling image of hundreds of Jews along railroad tracks at a Nazi deportation site.
The ghetto Jewish Council’s Department of Statistics had pressed Ross into service to shoot identification photos, as well as images of the factories there used as propaganda. Ross, however, took hundreds of other photos, often with the help of his wife, Stefania, that documented the horrid conditions.
On left, an untitled photo of the Lodz Ghetto by Henryk Ross, 1910-1991. On right, one by Ross of a Jewish doctor imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto. (Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts Boston)
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