Customer Reviews

Henryk Ross: Lodz Ghetto Album

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I think this is a great book--I was there and it took me back to my childhood. My husband and I were liberated by the Russians in January 1945 after being slaves in the Ghetto. Most of our family perished and we soon left Poland and eventually came to America in 1949.

These photographs took me back 60 years to that life. In fact, it is possible that the photo of the young couple kissing is, in fact, my husband & I!

For anyone interested in what life in the Lodz Ghetto was really like, this is an excellent book.

A relatively new and important addition to Holocaust photography, Henryk Ross risked his life in order to document the daily indignities, inhumane hardships, and calculated murder of the Jews trapped in the Lodz Ghetto. Since some of my family survived this Nazi-created community, I've searched other Lodz Ghetto and Holocaust literature for decades, seeking any evidence of family I never had the chance to meet. Only in the extraordinarlly courageous work of Henryk Ross work did I finally discover some photos of relatives. From the mundane of everyday existence to the horrors of daily hangings, Ross proves, literally in black-and-white, what life was like under Nazi rule. I don't think any collection of Holocaust history is complete without this unique book. The book even includes Ross's testimony at the Eichmann trial in Israel; testimony that was impossible to mock or minimize because of his ingenious decision to bury his photographs during the war and retrieve them following liberation. It's too bad that Henryk Ross's work was not more internationally recognized before he died (I think in the 1970s). When I look at books in my collection now with photo credits photos from different museums, hundreds of these unattributed photographs are actually by Ross--a truly important photojournalist.