Unearthed Collection of
Photographs Depicting Life Inside a World War II Jewish Ghetto to Go on View at
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
BOSTON (December 1,
2016)—In March 2017, the powerful exhibition Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto
Photographs of Henryk Ross makes its US debut at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston (MFA), presenting a moving and intimate visual record of the Holocaust
through the lens of Henryk Ross (1910–1991). The Polish Jewish photographer was
one of just 877 recorded survivors of the Lodz Ghetto’s original population of
more than 160,000 people, rounded up by the Nazi Germans and sealed off from
the outside world. Previously a photojournalist for the Polish press, Ross was
confined to the ghetto in 1940 and put to work by the Nazi regime as a
bureaucratic photographer; his tasks included taking photographs for Jewish
identification cards, as well as images that were used as propaganda to promote
the efficiency of the ghetto’s labor force. Unofficially—and at great risk—Ross
took it upon himself to document the complex realities of life in the Lodz
Ghetto under Nazi rule, culminating in the deportation of thousands to death
camps at Chelmno and Auschwitz. Fearing that he could be discovered, he hid his
negatives in 1944 and returned for them following the ghetto’s liberation,
discovering that more than half of the original 6,000 had survived. “I buried
my negatives in the ground in order that there should be some record of our
tragedy,” Ross later said. “I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish
Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom.” Memory
Unearthed, on view at the MFA from March 25 to July 30, 2017, presents
approximately 300 objects, including hundreds of photographs, artifacts such as
ghetto notices and the photographer’s own identification card, as well as
footage from the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, where Ross’s
photographs were submitted as evidence. An album of contact prints, handcrafted
by Ross and shown in its entirety as the centerpiece of the exhibition, serves
as a summation of his memories, capturing a personal narrative of a harrowing
moment in modern history. Organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, in
association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Lead support from Lisbeth
Tarlow and Stephen Kay. With generous support from Marc S. Plonskier and Heni
Koenigsberg, and Roberta and Stephen R. Weiner. Additional support provided by
The David Berg Foundation; Dr. John and Bette Cohen; the Rita J. and Stanley H.
Kaplan Family Foundation, Inc.; Mary Levin Koch and William Koch; Ronald and
Julia Druker; the Highland Street Foundation; Joy and Douglas Kant; Marjie and
Robert Kargman; Brian J. Knez; Myra Musicant and Howard Cohen; James and
Melinda Rabb; Cameron R. Rahbar and Dori H. Rahbar; the Schlebovitz Family;
Candice and Howard Wolk; Xiaohua Zhang and Quan Zhou; and the Andrew and Marina
Lewin Family Foundation. Educational and public programming is generously
supported by the Beker Foundation. Additional support provided by the Phillip
and Edith Leonian Foundation. With thanks to our partners Facing History and
Ourselves, and the Jewish Arts Collaborative (JArts).
“This exhibition, featuring
stories of the Lodz Ghetto through the lens of Polish Jewish photographer
Henryk Ross, is a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the power
of photography and collective memories,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, Ann and
Graham Gund Director of the MFA.
The Lodz Ghetto was the
longest-existing and second-largest, after Warsaw, of at least 1,000 ghettos
established by the Nazis to isolate Jews within the Eastern European cities
Germany occupied between 1939 and 1945. Ross and his wife Stefania were among
more than 160,000 people consolidated into a poor, industrial section of Lodz
(pronounced Wudz in Polish; Lodzh in Yiddish; Ludz in English), a city located
in the heart of Poland. Three months after the Lodz Ghetto was liberated by the
Russian Red Army in January 1945, Ross excavated a box containing canisters of
film, which he and Stefania had buried at 12 Jagielonska Street. In 2007, his
collection was given to the AGO, where Memory Unearthed, which features both
original prints made by Ross and digital prints made from his negatives,
debuted in January 2015.
“Ross’s images make up a
deeply moving record of human life and suffering,” said Maia-Mari Sutnik, the
AGO’s curator of special photography projects. “He had an ability to make many
singular moments into poignant narratives, allowing us to reflect on our
difficult history and remember.”
The MFA’s presentation of
Memory Unearthed is organized by Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh
Curator of Photographs.
“This exhibition tells the
story of one man’s act of resistance through photography, and is a testimony to
perseverance and survival,” said Gresh.
The German invasion of
Poland on September 1, 1939 marked the beginning of World War II. The German
Army occupied Lodz a week later and many members of the Jewish population fled
to other European countries as the Nazi regime terrorized the city and
destroyed Polish monuments and synagogues. The Germans created the Judenrat—the
Jewish Council—to enforce their policies within the Jewish community and
appointed 62-year-old Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski as Judenälteste, or Elder of
the Jews. In early 1940, the Nazis rounded up the city’s remaining Jews and
forced them into the Lodz Ghetto, sealed off from the outside world with
barbed-wire fencing.
Inside the ghetto,
Rumkowski employed a strategy of “survival through work.” Taking advantage of
Lodz’s prewar reputation as a successful textile center, he transformed the
Jewish population into a labor force for factories and workshops that produced
goods for the German market. As a photographer employed by the Jewish Council’s
Statistics Department, Ross was assigned to illustrate the productivity and
efficiency of the Lodz Ghetto and make identification cards for registered workers.
With his prior experience as a photojournalist for the Polish press, Ross
carefully composed images showing workers engaged in various stages of
production—including a series from 1942 that demonstrates the process of
assembling mattresses and another from 1943 highlighting work inside a leather
factory.
At the same time, Ross
secretly documented the grim realities of life in the Lodz Ghetto, where living
conditions were deplorable from the start and steadily deteriorated. In the
four-year period of the ghetto’s existence, a quarter of its inhabitants died
from starvation. Ross’s photographs show the administration overseeing
distribution of food rations (the amount of food given to each person depended
on his or her work status), children digging in the ground in search of
discarded potatoes, and people collapsing in the streets from hunger. Ross also
photographed the ghetto’s fecal workers—charged with pulling carts carrying
barrels of human excrement—who frequently contracted typhus and other fatal
diseases.
In 1942, the Nazis ordered
Lodz Ghetto’s Jewish Administration to deport nearly 20,000 residents,
targeting the elderly, the sick and children under the age of 10, who were seen
to have little value as workers. Thousands were rounded up from hospitals,
nursing homes and orphanages, torn from their families, dragged from hiding
places and sent to Chelmno, an extermination camp located about 30 miles north
of Lodz. The deportations continued until 1944, when the Germans ordered the
final liquidation of Lodz Ghetto and about 70,000 residents, including
Rumkowski, were taken to Auschwitz. Ross photographed police escorting large
crowds of people, some carrying suitcases and other belongings, as well as
horse-drawn carts transporting children and the elderly. One image, depicting
residents boarding freight wagons at Radogoszcz station, located outside the
boundaries of the Lodz Ghetto, was captured from a station storeroom, where
Ross hid and took photographs through a hole in the wood.
When the liquidation was
announced, Ross was among a group of about 900 residents held back to clean up
the ghetto and gather property from empty buildings. It was then that he buried
a box of his negatives in the ground. Following Lodz Ghetto’s liberation in
1945 and the subsequent recovery of his collection, Ross and his wife
immigrated to Israel in 1956. Five years later, he testified at the trial of
Adolf Eichmann, who played a pivotal role in the deportation of more than 1.5
million Jews from all over Europe to killing centers in occupied Poland and
parts of the occupied Soviet Union. The exhibition includes video footage from
the trial, in which Ross and Stefania recount their years in the Lodz Ghetto
under the Nazi administration.
In 1987, more than four
decades after the war, Ross assembled hundreds of contact prints selected from
his surviving negatives into a 17-page “folio” album, roughly arranged in rows.
While he numbered the frames, he did not restore the chronology of the
collection. Instead, the folio forms Ross’s own reflection of life and death in
the Lodz Ghetto, juxtaposing scenes of starvation and deportation with images
of everyday activities, family dinners and wedding celebrations. Enlarged
versions of the folio photographs are projected on a wall, following Ross’s
sequence.
The exhibition also
features a “Memory Wall,” composed of 100 modern prints of Ross’s portraits of
Lodz Ghetto residents—most taken before non-official photography was forbidden
in December 1941. In joyful snapshots and solemn introspections, Ross captured
the men, women and children of the ghetto with assurance and insight. For the
photographer and his subjects, these were calm moments, in which they could
briefly forget the everyday misery of life in the ghetto. Through Ross’s
photographs, each person left behind a lasting record of his or her dignified
existence, and the portrait wall serves as a reminder of photography’s ability
to create meaning and chronicle history.
The exhibition is
accompanied by an extensive catalogue, Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto
Photographs of Henryk Ross, produced by the Art Gallery of Ontario and
distributed by Yale University Press. It features essays by curators, critics,
filmmakers and scholars, including Maia-Mari Sutnik, Eric Beck Rubin, Bernice
Eisenstein, Michael Mitchell and Robert Jan van Pelt.
This spring, the MFA offers
an array of programming related to Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto
Photographs of Henryk Ross. In addition to small-group “Looking Together”
sessions, a four-session course explores the details of how Ross’s rare record
was created and survived, as well as how contemporary artists have responded to
photographs from major social movements. On April 26, May 17 and June 14,
Boston-area thinkers, entrepreneurs, activists, city officials and artists
gather at the Museum for The City Talks—a series of free public forums on
issues related to the exhibition’s themes, moderated by Adam Strom, Director of
Scholarship and Innovation at Facing History and Ourselves. A lecture on May 7
titled “Lest We Forget…” discusses how humankind responds in remarkable ways in
the face of adversity, and a concert on June 11 presents works composed and
performed in the Lodz, Vilna and Terezin ghettos, narrated by Mark Ludwig,
Executive Director of the Terezin Music Foundation. For more on events and
programming, visit mfa.org/programs.
The Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston (MFA), is recognized for the quality and scope of its collection,
representing all cultures and time periods. The Museum has more than 140
galleries displaying its encyclopedic collection, which includes Art of the
Americas; Art of Europe; Contemporary Art; Art of Asia; Art of Africa and
Oceania; Art of the Ancient World; Prints and Drawings; Photography; Textile
and Fashion Arts; and Musical Instruments. Open seven days a week, the MFA’s
hours are Saturday through Tuesday, 10 am–5 pm; and Wednesday through Friday,
10 am–10 pm. Admission (which includes one repeat visit within 10 days) is $25
for adults and $23 for seniors and students age 18 and older, and includes
entry to all galleries and special exhibitions. Admission is free for
University Members and individual youths age 17 and younger. Wednesday nights
after 4 pm admission is by voluntary contribution (suggested donation $25). MFA
Members are always admitted for free. The Museum’s mobile MFA Guide is
available at ticket desks and the Sharf Visitor Center for $5, members; $6,
non-members; and $4, youths. The Museum is closed on New Year’s Day, Patriots’
Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The MFA is located on the
Avenue of the Arts at 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115. For more
information, call 617.267.9300, visit mfa.org or follow the MFA on Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram.
http://www.mfa.org/news/memory-unearthed
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario