The New York Times
January 18, 2005

Hesitantly, Holocaust Survivors Revisit Past
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ


Photo:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/20....slidetwo.html
Caption:
Jonathan Player for The New York Times
As the official photographer of the German-supervised Jewish Council, Henryk
Ross was able to capture scenes of the seemingly contented ghetto "elite,"
or Jews who held coveted jobs.


LONDON, Jan. 17 - The survivors of the Lodz ghetto held their magnifying
glasses close to the photographs and fixed their eyes on each enlarged
image, searching for a familiar face, a recognizable building, a known
street.

"I am trying to find someone I know," said Esther Brunstein, 76, a native of
Lodz, Poland, who lived in the notorious ghetto as a child from 1940 to
1944, before she and her mother were taken to the Nazi death camp at
Auschwitz. Of the more than 200,000 people who lived in the Lodz ghetto,
only 5 percent or fewer are thought to have survived the war. "Here, look,"
she said, "someone is selling something on a scale, perhaps a little
medicine, a little food."

"But I won't look at many more," she said as her magnifying glass rested on
the face of a beaming toddler. "You see, when I see the face of a child like
this, and then you know he did not survive."

Arrayed before the survivors for a private viewing on Sunday was the largest
collection of images of ghetto life during the Holocaust by single
photographer, Henryk Ross. Mr. Ross, an official photographer of the Jewish
Council, the ghetto's German-supervised administrators, lived in Lodz for
years and chronicled its daily life. As the Germans prepared in 1944 to
round up most of the ghetto residents for deportation to Auschwitz, Mr. Ross
buried his 3,000 negatives. While his photographs include more familiar
images of the horrific aspects of ghetto life, because of the nature of his
job they also show less frequently seen scenes of the seemingly contented
ghetto "elite," Jews who worked as ghetto supervisors and police officers or
held coveted jobs.

These latter pictures are at the heart of Mr. Ross's collection and raise
difficult questions about the tiny minority of people in the ghetto who
lived relatively privileged lives amid mass deprivation and were reproached,
some as collaborators, after the war. Among them are Chaim Rumkowski, the
feared and despised leader of the Lodz ghetto's Jewish Council.

"It was a very complex society, and a class system existed," said Janina
Struk, who was at Sunday's gathering and is author of "Photographing the
Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence" (Chris Boot, 2004). "We are
seeing a people who had to survive, who had birthday parties, who took
photos of each other. We are so used to images of horror that when you look
at something different, it is easy to say it's not true."

After the war, Mr. Ross, who later emigrated to Israel and died in 1991,
retrieved his negatives, distributing a few of the most ghastly images,
which served to document the atrocities of the time. His son offered the
collection to the Archive of Modern Conflict in London in 1997.

The collection, aside from 100 images published last year in "Lodz Ghetto
Album" (Chris Boot), had never been seen by the public until Sunday, when
six survivors of the ghetto, along with a few relatives and academics,
gathered in a room of the National Portrait Gallery here to search for
recognizable faces and discuss their impressions.

Helen Aronson, 77, who lived in the ghetto from 1942 until its liberation by
Soviet troops in January 1945, planted the idea for the meeting after she
spotted her boyfriend in a photograph in "Lodz Ghetto Album" three months
ago at a Holocaust commemoration ceremony.

"I know this man, I know this man with the accordion," Mrs. Aronson recalls
saying as she looked at the image of young people celebrating the arrival of
Soviet troops in Lodz. "This is my boyfriend, Wysocki Szlomo, my first
love."

Her daughter, who was with her at the event, said: "Mum, look at the girl
sitting next to him. That is you. That is you."

So it was, and soon Mrs. Aronson called other survivors to spread the news.
They asked the archive for a viewing of the collection.

The fresh images, even after so many years, stirred a labyrinth of emotions.
The memories proved disquieting, not only because some of the images
recorded suffering, but also because some showed the mundane and the
contented.

The two women in the group seemed the most interested in scouring the
pictures. The four men seemed considerably more reluctant. Aron Zylberszac,
67, who spent four years in the ghetto and a year in labor camps, sat in his
wheelchair and avoided the task altogether.

"All of these images are very much stuck in my mind," he said. "I still have
dreams every night, and photographs make it worse, which is why I don't like
looking at them. In the dreams I am always trying to run away and always
trying to hide. It is so realistic, like it was all happening, and I wake up
in a sweat. I am completely wet."

As one image, a photograph of a postage stamp, was projected on a screen,
Perec Zylberberg, 80, who is Mrs. Brunstein's brother, recognized himself.
The stamp, of the internal ghetto postal service, included a photograph of
him working behind a loom. "I am there," he said, nodding.

Mrs. Aronson picked out another familiar face, a young man holding a rabbit
and staring into the camera smiling. "He was my friend," she said, "and here
is his family."

As the official photographer, Mr. Ross, along with his colleague Mendel
Grossman, was directed to catalog everyday life.

The photographs include images of tailors, cleaners, weavers and doctors at
work; of the hungry searching for food and ladling soup into their mouths.
There are also unauthorized single frames of Jews being loaded into the
cattle cars that carried them to extermination and labor camps, a corpse
hanging from a noose in Lodz square, people escaping from the hospital as
the Germans rounded up the sick, the old and the very young to send to their
deaths. Mr. Ross, academics say, risked his life to record those scenes.

The photographs of the elite or the "protected class," as the survivors here
called it, were the most striking in their departure from the stark pictures
typically associated with the Holocaust. They featured smiling children in
neatly pressed clothes, sitting around a table laden with food and drink for
a party. A plump boy in a mini-policeman's uniform, marching with his young
friends around the street. Revelers gathered on top of a horse-drawn
carriage.

"It looks like Nazi propaganda," said Susanne Pearson, 76, who last saw her
parents in 1939, when she was taken to Britain as a child. Her parents were
sent to the Lodz ghetto, and she never saw them again. "I know I will not
find my mother and father among them."

The former residents of the ghetto held a complicated, decidedly nuanced
view of these images, and wavered between bitterness and understanding. "We
can't today judge certain circumstances of Lodz ghetto and Rumkowski," said
Roman Halter, 77, who was among the last to be taken to Auschwitz.

"I am very hurt and bitter about the way the Lodz ghetto was run," Mr.
Halter said. "I lost my whole family in Lodz." But, he added: "They were
exceptional circumstances. And it is easy to say now, 'He should have done
this.' "

The elite encompassed both the bad and the good, Mrs. Brunstein said. A
ghetto policeman saved her life after he spied her and her mother hiding on
a roof during a German roundup and continued on his way.

"Hunger does not bring out noble feelings," she said. "We knew it was a
hierarchy. They were privileged and they had more food. If I had a chance, I
would have taken it, too, depending on the price."

For Mrs. Aronson, the photographs touch a more personal chord. She was
indirectly a part of the elite, she said. Her father, who she said died
after trying to save the children of her small town, knew Mr. Rumkowski and,
because of that, Mrs. Aronson, her mother and brother were given good jobs.
Hers was at an orphanage and later at a confectionary factory. She was in
Lodz until the war ended.

"To say that we were privileged and that we knew we were going to survive is
a load of rubbish," she said, adding that she, too, went hungry and feared
for her life. "We had the same rations as everyone else. My brother got from
the Germans a bit of food now and again. Food was the most important thing
to survive."

But survival, she added, was never a given. Safety came only after
liberation, when, after hiding in a bunker with 15 others for more than a
week with a vial of poison in her possession, they heard Russian voices.

Shortly after, she and her accordion-playing boyfriend sat down with
friends, pulled out the accordion, and smiled for Mr. Ross's camera.


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