Holocaust Ghetto Photographs Survived Buried in the Ground – Gardeners 1940-1944

“The scarecrow too has to carry the yellow star.” Henryk Ross, Polish, 1910 – 1991.

Boy searching for food.

Photojournalist Henryk Ross was forced to work by the Nazi regime as a bureaucratic photographer for the Jewish Administration’s statistics department. He was one of at least 160,000 people held in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland.

All photos by Henryk Ross
Art Gallery of Ontario
The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross
A Collection of Holocaust Photographs
(Must see. Mike)

Excerpt:

Ross buried his negatives in 1944 in attempt to preserve the historical record of what had happened in Lodz. As one of the mere 877 recorded survivors of the ghetto, Ross returned for the negatives after Lodz’s liberation, discovering that more than half of the original 6,000 remained intact.

Men working in a vegetable garden.

Ross’s work was preserved through an act of will. They demonstrate photography’s ability to bear witness to history and serve as a catalyst for change; to foster sympathy, awareness, and even critical commentary. Ross’s photographs aim to capture the events he witnessed — though the stories they tell are still open to new understandings.

Art Gallery of Ontario. Use the search engine, using such terms as “food garden” and “garden” to retrieve photos.

Note: An exhibition, “Memory Unearthed,” organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, presents more than 200 of Ross’s photographs. It is on view in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts from March 25 to July 30.

A ghetto resident tending to a garden in hope of food.

Children searching in the ground for waste food, coal and wood.

Elderly man working in a garden.

Man standing in a vegetable garden.

Residents digging for food, coal, and other provisions.

Residents working in a garden plot.

Residents working in a vegetable garden.

Young man, holding two rabbits, beside a vegetable garden.

Boy searching for food.

A couple in the garden-beds.