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Documenting as a “Passion and Obsession”: Photographs from the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2015

Andrea Löw
Andrea Löw*
Affiliation:
Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ), Munich-Berlin
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Abstract

The Jews who lived in the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) ghetto endeavored in a variety of written ways to document their experiences for later generations. Photographers who lived in the ghetto also helped capture on film the daily reality of those who lived there. In this way, the foundation was laid for a later investigation of the ghetto—one from the perspective of the victims, who wanted to ensure that the perpetrators would not be able to monopolize future interpretations of what had transpired there. After providing a brief overview of the history of the ghetto and of the archive set up by the Jewish ghetto administration specifically for this task, the article focuses on the activities of two photographers in particular: Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross, who secretly, and at great risk to their own lives, attempted to capture as many aspects of ghetto life as possible. The article discusses a number of their photographs, the way in which they came into being, and the likely motivation of those who made them.

Die Menschen im Getto Litzmannstadt/Lodz versuchten auf vielfältige schriftliche Art und Weise ihr Leben und Sterben für nachfolgende Generationen zu dokumentieren. Aber abgesehen davon lebten hier auch Fotografen, die mit den ihnen eigenen Mitteln die Lebenswirklichkeit der Menschen darstellten. So wurde bereits im Getto der Grundstein für eine spätere Erforschung desselben gelegt, und zwar aus der Perspektive der Verfolgten. Diese wollten sicherstellen, dass die Täter später nicht die Deutungshoheit haben würden. Der Aufsatz untersucht nach einer Einführung in die Geschichte des Gettos Litzmannstadt/Lodz und einer Darstellung des Archivs, das innerhalb der jüdischen Verwaltung einzig zum Zwecke einer solchen Dokumentation des Gettolebens bestand, insbesondere das Wirken zweier Fotografen: Mendel Grossman und Henryk Ross. Beide versuchten heimlich und unter großer Gefahr möglichst viele Bereiche des Gettolebens fotografisch festzuhalten. Im Aufsatz werden sowohl einige dieser Fotografien und ihr Entstehungszusammenhang vorgestellt als auch die Motivation ihrer Urheber behandelt.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 48 , Special Issue 3: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History , September 2015 , pp. 387 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2015 

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References

1 Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 2.

2 Jakub Poznański, Tagebuch aus dem Ghetto Litzmannstadt, ed. Ingo Loose (Berlin: Metropol, 2011), 130.

3 The more than 450 photographs that turned up in an antiquarian bookstore in Vienna in 1987 are now held in the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt am Main. See Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt, ed., “Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit.” Das Ghetto in Lodz 1940–1944 (Frankfurt/Main: Löcker, 1990).

4 See Penny Tinkler, Using Photographs in Social and Historical Research (London: Sage, 2013).

5 For the history of the Lodz Ghetto, see Julian Baranowski, Łódzkie Getto 1940–1944. Vademecum (Łódź: Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi, 1999); Michal Unger, The Last Ghetto: Life in the Lodz Ghetto, 1940–1944 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1995); Andrea Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt. Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006); Isaiah Trunk, Lodz Ghetto: A History, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

6 Rumkowski wanted to prevent Germans from coming into the ghetto to organize these deportations themselves in what, he expected, would have been a more brutal manner, and thus saw his administration's cooperation as a form of damage control. This cooperation is one of the reasons why Rumkowski was so heavily criticized in the ghetto at the time, as well as after the war, and why he was arguably the most controversial chairman of a Jewish Council. For a summary and balanced approach, see Michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004); for a more recent appraisal, see Monika Polit, Mordechaj Chaim Rumkowski. Prawda i Zmyślenie (Warsaw: Polish Centre for Holocaust Research Association, 2012). On Chełmno, see Shmuel Krakowski, Das Todeslager Chełmno / Kulmhof. Der Beginn der “Endlösung” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007); Patrick Montague, Chełmno and the Holocaust: A History of Hitler's First Death Camp (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). For a discussion of what and when Jews in the Lodz Ghetto knew about the deportees' fate, see Andrea Löw, “‘Wanderung ins Ungewisse’? Was wussten die Juden in den Ghettos Litzmannstadt und Warschau 1942 über die Vernichtung?,” in Naziverbrechen. Täter, Taten, Bewältigungsversuche, ed. Martin Cüppers, Jürgen Matthäus, and Andrej Angrick (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013), 258–72.

7 See Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt, 489–91.

8 Trunk, Lodz; Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2002).

9 Sascha Feuchert, Erwin Leibfried, and Jörg Riecke, eds., Die Chronik des Gettos Lodz /Litzmannstadt, 5 vols. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008). The English version contains only approximately a quarter of the original text: Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941–1944 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).

10 On the encyclopedia, see Andrea Löw, “Die Erfahrung der radikalen Ungleichheit. Vom sprachlichen Umgang mit dem Gettoleben in Litzmannstadt (Lodz),” in Ungleichheiten im “Dritten Reich”. Semantiken, Praktiken, Erfahrungen, ed. Nicole Kramer and Armin Nolzen (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012), 48–68.

11 Nachman Zonabend, “For the Record: How the Lodz Ghetto Documents were Rescued,” in The Documents of the Lodz Ghetto: An Inventory of the Nachman Zonabend Collection, comp. Marek Web (New York: YIVO, 1988), 8.

12 Little is known about Lejb Maliniak (born 1908)—the only other photographer from the ghetto known by name—and only very few pictures can be clearly attributed to him. That is why this article concentrates on the other two photographers.

13 Many still well-known German companies ordered products from the Lodz Ghetto, including Neckermann, AEG, Telefunken, and the Alsterhaus in Hamburg. For the role the German Gettoverwaltung played in all this, see Peter Klein, Die “Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt” 1940–1944. Eine Dienststelle im Spannungsfeld von Kommunalbürokratie und staatlicher Verfolgungspolitik (Hamburg: Christians, 2009).

14 See also Loewy, Hanno, “‘Nähmaschinen-Reparatur-Abteilung’. Ein Album von 1943 aus dem Ghetto Lodz,” Fotogeschichte, vol. 9, no. 34 (1989), 11–30Google Scholar. Albums aimed at demonstrating productivity were created in other ghettos as well. Janina Struk mentions one, for example, that employees gave to the chairman of the Judenrat in the Kielce Ghetto, as well as one produced by the manager of the Schultz factory in the Warsaw Ghetto. See Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 87.

15 Loewy, Hanno, “P.W.O.K. Arie Ben Menachems Album,” Fotogeschichte, vol. 11, no. 39 (1991), 35–46Google Scholar; Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 89.

16 Quoted by the English version in Dobroszycki, Chronicle, 119–20; also see Feuchert et al., eds, Chronik, vol. 2, 36, 621. Nothing more is known about this project, though one possible clue to its existence lies in the fact that in mid-1942, it was still possible to have portraits taken by photographers. In a diary entry dated June 20, 1942, Dawid Sierakowiak mentioned that he had only realized his own poor condition after seeing a photograph he had had taken. It is not clear from this entry who took the photograph: somebody from the Photographical Office within the Statistical Department, or another photographer, possibly from this “Photographers' Collective.” See Das Ghettotagebuch des Dawid Sierakowiak: Aufzeichnungen eines Siebzehnjährigen 1941/42 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1993), 123.

17 Ingo Loose, “‘The Face of the Ghetto.’ Photographs and Photographers in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, 1940–1944,” in Das Gesicht des Gettos. Bilder jüdischer Photographen aus dem Getto Litzmannstadt 1940–1944/The Face of the Ghetto: Pictures taken by Jewish Photographers in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto 1940–1944, ed. Ingo Loose and Thomas Lutz (Berlin: Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, 2010), 33; idem, “Der Ghettoalltag in der zeitgenössischen Photographie,” in Lebenswelt Ghetto. Alltag und soziales Umfeld während der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung, ed. Imke Hansen, Katrin Steffen, and Joachim Tauber (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), 267–90.

18 This information is from an interview conducted by Janina Struk with Arie Ben-Menachem (alternatively spelled Arieh Ben-Menachem). See Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 86. See also Kinzel, Tanja, “Der Blick auf den Menschen. Porträtfotografien aus dem Getto Litzmannstadt,” in Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung 13, nos. 1/2 (2012), 102–37Google Scholar.

19 Pinchas Shaar, “Mendel Grosman: Photographic Bard of the Lodz Ghetto,” in Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav,1999), 127. Emphasis in original.

20 See YIVO, RG 241/719, letter from Rumkowski to Grossmann, Dec. 8, 1941; see also Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt, 423–24.

21 Henryk Ross explained after the war how he had taken photographs during the 1944 resettlements: “I was locked in a store from where I was able, though a hole in the wood, to photograph this deportation. After being locked in for fourteen hours, the workers who conspired with me let me out. It was extremely dangerous for me.” Quoted in Martin Parr, ed., Lodz Ghetto Album: Photographs by Henryk Ross (London: Chris Boot, 2004), 12, 27. On Ben-Menachem's father, see Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 92.

22 For an outstanding interpretation of such diaries, see Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

23 Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days, 315.

24 Ibid.

25 For this perspective, see also Doris L. Bergen, Anna Hájková, and Andrea Löw, “Warum eine Alltagsgeschichte des Holocaust?,” in Alltag im Holocaust. Jüdisches Leben im Großdeutschen Reich 1941–1945, ed. Andrea Löw, Doris L. Bergen, and Anna Hájková (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013), 1–12.

26 See Weber's introduction to Parr, Lodz Ghetto Album, 21.

27 Loose, “Face,” 35.

28 Tanja Kinzel, “Zwangsarbeit im Fokus. Drei fotografische Perspektiven aus dem Ghetto Litzmannstadt,” in Im Ghetto 1939–1945. Neue Forschungen zu Alltag und Umfeld, ed. Christoph Dieckmann and Babette Quinkert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009), 177–78.

29 Judith Cohen, “Jewish Ghetto Photographers,” in Regards sur les ghettos/Scenes from the Ghetto, ed. Mémorial de la Shoah (Paris: Éditions du Mémorial de la Shoah, 2013), 145.

30 Arnold Mostowicz, quoted in Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 96.

31 Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 96.

32 Arieh Ben-Menahem, “Mendel Grosman – The Photographer of the Lodz Ghetto,” in With a Camera in the Ghetto: Mendel Grosman, ed. Zvi Szner and Alexander Sened (New York: Schocken, 1977), 101, 104.

33 Henryk Ross and Aleksander Klugman, The Last Journey of the Jews of Lodz (Tel Aviv: Kibel Publishing, 1950); Szner and Sened, With a Camera in the Ghetto.

34 Many of those photographs were published for the first time in Parr, Lodz Ghetto Album. On the idea of an everyday life and moments of happiness, see Löw, Bergen, and Hájková, Alltag im Holocaust.

35 Quoted in Parr, Lodz Ghetto Album, 153.