This is a fascinating article from the Forward about the realities of life in the Lodz ghetto which was eventually virtually liquidated by the nazis. The realities of "privilege" within genocidal oppression are quite fascinating.
You'll need to register (free) to read it online, so I am sending the entire text: http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?id=2492 Home > Arts & CultureArts & Culture Negatives of Lodz PHOTOGRAPHY By Joshua Cohen January 7, 2005 PRAGUE, Czech Republic — At a photography exhibit that recently opened here, I noticed an untitled image that, at first sight, bears the unexpected mark of Marc Chagall. In it, a member of the Lodz Ghetto's Judenrat (Jewish Council) police force is standing imperiously and staring directly at the camera's eye while a watering can seems to levitate a breath above his head. But when I looked closer, I thought, no: There's a slight wisp of arm holding up the watering can. This is where the questions begin, and the texture of the photographer's considerable achievement becomes apparent: Did the Jewish policeman know that he was being ridiculed? If he didn't, and he found out, what would happen? How long can seemingly good-natured jibing go on between two Jews in the Lodz Ghetto until their relationship falls to drown in the flows of official power? Or, to put it more simply: How long can a Jew hold a watering can over a Judenrat policeman's head until something terrible happens? Such are the absurdities imbuing the grim surfaces of the photographs of Henryk Ross. Born May 1910, Ross began a career in photojournalism covering sports for a score of Warsaw newspapers. Between 1940 and 1944, with the liquidation and closure of the ghetto in Lodz — a large town of a quarter-million Jews prior to the establishment of the ghetto — Ross parlayed his skills and experience into work for the Judenrat and their Department of Statistics. The results of his work are 6,000 photos, a "private" portion of which Ross withheld during his lifetime (he died in 1991), and that were published only in book form earlier this year by Chris Boot in London. They are now on exhibit in the Langhans Gallery in Prague, a city from which almost 5,000 Jews were deported to the Lodz Ghetto, of whom fewer than 300 survived. "I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry," Ross said about his photographic work, about half of it off the Judenrat's forced-official mandate and so forbidden on punishment of death. "I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom." Ross offered the world that official, expected record in the 1960s, when — after digging up the photographs he buried to survive the war (many negatives were destroyed in the process) — he published "The Last Journey of the Jews of Lodz." This book featured harrowing images now familiar to the world, the stock-in-trade of Holocaust photography: deportations, executions and so on. From a purely artistic standpoint, these images represented the horrific apex of photography's century. But Ross withheld, and went on withholding. After the war, and the resurrection of his images, Ross sent thousands of negatives — all unsorted, half official and half not — through the Israeli Consulate in Poland to Israel. The recipients in Israel misplaced the photographs, and it was only through the efforts of David Ben-Gurion himself and the Council Satat (an Israeli arts organization) that 3,000 were found later. When Ross moved to Israel in the late 1960s, more of the "private" images — numbering in the thousands — came with him. Finally cataloged in the late 1980s by Ross and his wife, Stefania, these images present a much different image of the Lodz Ghetto than the orthodox interpretations of both the scholarly and popular media. Ross, who survived Lodz as a member of the ghetto cleanup squad still intact when the city was liberated by the Red Army, forced himself to witness all aspects of his ghetto world. And so his Revisionist history was already being revised as he lived it. With a camera permit from the Judenrat, detailed instructions of what to shoot when and extra film he obtained in exchange for his own daily bread, Ross quietly defied orders and captured images that escape most traditional idealizations of ghetto life. They show privilege amid destitution and starvation; they depict a happy few amid total squalor. For those raised with simple, almost Manichean notions of guilt and innocence, it's as if a trapdoor were opened in the floor of a Weltanschaaung, and the whole world fell through it into even greater incoherence. We see children's parties in Lodz thrown by wealthier families who had managed to save their money somehow, or who were opportunistic collaborators and profiteers of ghetto labor. We see young Jewish children playing Nazi and Jew, or Judenrat-official and Jew, one taking a stick to the other while mugging for the camera with an enormous, self-satisfied smile. We see real Judenrat police officers, Council Satat in well-tailored uniforms and shining helmets, encountering everyday people — their former friends? family? — in a tension that seems to rise from the depths and explode the photograph's frame. The most "intelligent" photograph in the Prague exhibit is so subtle as to be almost whisper weight in its commentary. It's a photograph of ghetto workers, under the supervision of the Judenrat police, excavating a cesspit at the end of the notorious Franciszkanska Street. An enormous panorama less black and white and more gray and gray, the entire photograph pivots on a man in the foreground off to the right. That man was Mendel Grossman, Ross's fellow Judenrat photographer. Grossman is shooting the same picture as Ross, but from another angle, from the side. This shot nested within a shot of forced labor in one of the worst ghettos in all of European history is quite simply the one visual documentation of the Holocaust most relevant to our time. It shows the Nazis' mania to document, to keep order and record. And it shows, too, the Jewish need to preserve memory, to transmit the past with an urgency of the deepest order. The tension between those two modes of being is Ross's greatest topic, and the most fertile ground of questions for the future of Holocaust study. Joshua Cohen is a columnist for the New York Press and an editor of the Prague Literary Review. A collection of his short fiction appears this fall on Twisted Spoon Press. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. A simple way to provide underprivileged children resources often lacking in public schools. 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