Henryk Ross stands with fellow survivors, on the other side of the war, holding a box he has just unearthed - photos, negatives, and documents he buried in the Lodz Ghetto when he feared he would be deported and murdered in Auschwitz.
Ross had been put to work by the Nazi regime as a photographer for the Jewish Administration’s Statistics Department (“NO CAMERAS ALLOWED,” reads an announcement that was posted in the ghetto). He used his access to a camera and official position as cover, endangering his life to create “some record of our tragedy.”
Approximately half of Ross’s 6,000 negatives survived. Some of the nearly 200 photographs exhibited in 'Memory Unearthed' bear signs of moisture damage, of burial.
Digitized photos scroll on a platform angled up from the gallery floor. Images, rising.
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This is the first time 'Memory Unearthed' has been exhibited at a Holocaust memorial museum. Some visitors move through the material as though along a thread of personal connection.
Down the hall, in New Dimensions in Testimony℠, a projection of Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter will tell you - when you ask him - that he was born in Lodz, Poland.
“My parents were in the Lodz Ghetto,” a woman on the tour says.
We pause in front of the map: 1.6 square miles. We discuss Ross’ technique for preserving film.
“These are from Museum collections,” I say regarding a case of artifacts. “A couple’s identification cards and worker cards, a coupon for healthcare; here’s a photo of the group wedding where they were married inside the Ghetto—”
“Those are my parents,” the woman interrupts me, startled. She and her sisters donated these items years ago. Here they are, again, shifting the air.
Behind us, a photo by Ross: a man trudges through the snow, through the remains of the synagogue on Wolborska Street that was destroyed by the Nazis in 1939.
The woman tells us how her parents Rywka and Juda Putersznyt (later: Peters) survived.