Henryk Ross

Henryk Ross (1 May 1910 1991) was a Polish Jewish photographer known for his official and clandestine photographs of the Łódź Ghetto during the Holocaust. Employed by the Department of Statistics for the Jewish Council, he used his position to document scenes of daily life, hunger, deportations, and violence in the ghetto. Before the ghetto’s liquidation, he buried thousands of negatives, about half of which survived after liberation.

About Ross was born in 1910. Ross was a sports photographer for a Warsaw newspaper, prior to World War II.

From 1940, Ross worked with his colleague Mendel Grossman producing identity and propaganda photographs for the Department of Statistics of the Judenrat in the Łódź Ghetto.

Part of his official duties was taking identity photographs. He constructed a three level stage in his studio that let him photograph up to twelve people with a single negative. While the authorities supplied him with only enough film for assigned work, this trick allowed him extra film he could use for unauthorized photography.

In 1944, the Nazis started the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto and the deportation of the remaining Jews from it to Chelmno and Auschwitz. In the fall of 1944, Ross buried his photos and negatives in a box, hoping they might survive as a historical record. About 800 Jews, including Ross, were left in the ghetto for cleanup work; according to Yad Vashem, eight mass graves had already been prepared for them. Ross survived until the Red Army entered Łódź in January 1945. After liberation, he retrieved the buried box of photographs. Although much of the material had been damaged or destroyed by water, about half of his 6,000 images survived.

Ross in 1950 emigrated to Israel and testified during the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. He died in 1991.

Legacy In 2021, the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston received a donation of 48 silver gelatin prints by Ross, making it one of the few museums in the United States to hold his work.

Ross’s photographs were included in the 2006 Barbican exhibition In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century. In The Guardian, Blake Morrison wrote that the posthumous availability of Ross’s whole negatives collection complicated earlier understandings of the archive by showing both scenes of suffering and images of ordinary or comparatively privileged life in the ghetto. Chris Boot, the publisher of Łódź Ghetto Album, described Ross’s photographs as significant both as historical documentation and as a body of photographic work. He argued that the archive was “arguably the most extensive single collection by any single photographer on any aspect of the Holocaust” and noted Ross’s “photographic vision”.