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Reliving a Horror to Decipher an Enigma

(Wall Street Journal) Thomas Weber - Sixty years ago Helen Aronson stepped out of her hideout in the Lodz Ghetto - the Holocaust's second largest. On Sunday she was at the National Portrait Gallery in London to see, for the first time, the recently discovered Ross Collection, the most extensive and important record of the Holocaust by any single photographer. Henryk Ross (1910-91), an official Jewish photographer in the ghetto, also secretly recorded its suffering. After the war, while he made some of his photos available for use in the Eichmann trial and in Holocaust museums, we never saw the great majority of Ross's pictures during his lifetime. I first encountered his full collection in the late 1990s, opening an old, bulky suitcase filled with photos, negatives, ghetto announcements, and newspapers. The Archive of Modern Conflict in London had just acquired the collection from his son and asked me to evaluate it for them. I soon realized that this collection had the potential to revolutionize the way we understand life in the Holocaust. The writer, visiting assistant professor of European history at the University of Chicago, wrote the text for Lodz Ghetto Album: Photographs by Henryk Ross (2004).
2005-01-21 00:00:00
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