Henryk Ross

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Public prosecutor Gideon Hausner (standing right) questions the witness Henryk Ross (at the microphone) about his photos during the Eichmann trial, May 2, 1961

Henryk Ross (born May 1, 1910 in Warsaw , † 1991 in Israel ) was a Polish-Israeli photographer and survivor of the Holocaust .

Life

Henryk Ross worked as a press photographer for various Polish newspapers in Łódź before the war and was drafted into the Polish army during the war. After the German occupation of Poland , the city's Jewish population was locked up in the Litzmannstadt ghetto from April 1940 , including Henryk Ross and his wife Stefania.

Ross got a job as a photographer with the Jewish administration of the ghetto, which only apparently acted independently under the control of the Germans. He mainly took portraits for the identity cards of the ghetto residents, which were issued by the German chief officer Hans Biebow , he also photographed samples of the goods manufactured in the ghetto and had other commissioned work for the German ghetto supervisors. Ross also managed to document the everyday life of the initially approximately 200,000 inhabitants of the ghetto. These photos show the supposed normality under the conditions of the ghetto imprisonment and, although he was not commissioned to produce such pictures, the suffering and death in the ghetto, in which the Germans let the population starve. The elderly, sick and children were segregated and deported to extermination camps; the ghetto population capable of working had to work in workshops for the Wehrmacht equipment.

When most of the ghetto population had been deported to the Kulmhof and Auschwitz extermination camps in the summer of 1944 , Ross was part of the cleanup team in the disbanded ghetto. As a result, he was able to bury numerous photos and documents and recover the boxes after the liberation in March 1945. Photos of his colleague Mendel Grossman, who was killed on the death march from the Königs Wusterhausen subcamp in 1945 , have also been preserved.

After the war Ross ran a photo shop in Łódź. Ross and his wife Stefania emigrated to Israel in 1956, and he took the photos with him. In Tel Aviv he worked in a zincography company . At the Eichmann trial in 1961, Ross was heard in Polish as a witness and photographs of him were presented by the public prosecutor as evidence. Adolf Eichmann's defense attorney Robert Servatius did not comment on the documents. Initially, mainly the photos that document the suffering in the ghetto were published. Since Ross also photographed everyday scenes outside of the horror and also saved these negatives, these were later taken into account when selecting the images.

His son left the negatives to the London “Archive of Modern Conflict”; 3,000 other negatives are now in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto .

Fonts

  • with Aleksander Klugman : The last journey of the Jews of Lodz . S. Kibel, Tel-Aviv, approx. 1967, first 1950.
  • Thomas Weber : Lodz Ghetto Album: Photographs by Henryk Ross (photographs selected by Timothy Prus & Martin Parr) . Archives of Modern Conflict. Chris Booth, London 2004, ISBN 0-9542813-7-3 .

literature

  • The genius of photography. Right time, right place. Henryk Ross; Robert Capa; W Eugene Smith . BBC Four , London 2007. DVD-Video (English).
Documentary series exploring the history of photography - from daguerreotype to digital, from portraits to photo-journalism, from art to advertising. Episode 3 examines the photographs of D-Day, the Holocaust and Hiroshima raising questions about history as seen through the viewfinder. Covers the work of Henryk Ross, Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eichmann trial, 23rd session, May 2, 1961 at Nizkor
  2. ^ Eichmann trial, 24th session, May 2, 1961 at Nizkor
personal data
SURNAME Ross, Henryk
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Israeli photographer
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw
DATE OF DEATH 1991
Place of death Israel