Contextual and Critical Analysis
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/grossman.html
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/orderpolice.html
Mendel Grossman was a Jewish photographer in the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) ghetto, born in 1913.
He was avid for knowledge, a lover of literature, the theatre and the arts, a painter, a sculptor, and also an amateur photographer who believed that photography was an art.
His photographs flowers, still-life, landscapes, street scenes, portraits, taken against the background of clouds, were works of art filled with expression, leaving strong impressions on the viewer.
man in motion.
He now found motion and expression not on the stage, but in the streets, among children playing, labourers at work in the Jewish quarter of Baluty.
the Jewish organisation for the protection of children’s health, approached him with an attractive proposition – to prepare an album of pictures of Jewish children.
It was the summer of 1939, the album never appeared and the photographs got lost in the war, and at the same time so did their subjects the Jewish child.
In the horror of the Lodz ghetto he had found his mission, to photograph and thus record the great tragedy taking place in the ghetto before his eyes.
He photographed them in their suffering, as they sank into the depths of pain, in their struggles, in their illnesses, and in their death.
He recorded with his camera what took place in the tortured ghetto, the Holocaust at its intensity.
The story of his family is typical of Jewish families in Lodz. Mendel realised this, and intensively photographed his loved ones, so that over the years he created a horrifying record of their slow progress toward death.
He spent most of his time in the streets, in the narrow alleys, in homes, in soup kitchens, in bread lines, in workshops, at the cemetery.
He did not seek beauty, for there was no beauty in the ghetto, there were children bloated with hunger, eyes searching for a crust of bread, living “death notices” as those near death, but still on their feet were called in ghetto slang.
He photographed conveys of men and women condemned to death in the gas-vans of Chelmno, public executions
Mendel no longer hesitated, he gave into the urge which motivated so many Jews to leave a record, to write down the events, to collect documents, to scratch a name on the wall of the prison cell, to write next to the name of the condemned the word “vengeance.”
Still Mendel thought that he should change his technique, from then on he climbed electric power posts to photograph a convoy of deportees on their way to the trains, he walked roofs, climbed the steeple of a church that remained within the confines of the ghetto in order to photograph a change of guard at the barbed-wire fence.
The German’s were tense as the hangman tightened the noose around the victim’s neck. Mendel clicked the shutter, the silence was so absolute that even this muted sound reached the ears of a German policeman, and he turned his head.
There, in the Church of the Virgin Mary, the pillows and featherbeds were ripped open by Jewish men and women, then the feathers were cleaned, sorted, packed and shipped to Germany, to merchants who sold them in the Reich.
He created evidence of the crime, the full extent of which was not yet known to him. Only his intuition told him that this must be recorded.
Mendel again and again stressed in conversations with friends that he expected those negatives eventually to reach Tel Aviv and be given to the theatre.
he only wanted his photographs to be exhibited as testimony of what took place in the ghetto.
Dead bodies were collected and thrown on a heap in the cemetery. Mendel decided he need to record these events, Mendel attached himself to the gravediggers and went to the cemetery, with his camera in his hand.
Mendel first turned his attention to the open mass grave, inside were deportees from the nearby town Zdunska Wola. They had died of suffocation in the tightly packed trains.
Mendel managed to take photographs before the gravediggers did their job of covering the evidence.
his lens directed toward the starving and the sick who were not allowed to be sick because there was no room for them in the ghetto, and therefore all medical institutions were liquidated.
He photographed almost exclusively the convoys, the places where the deportees were concentrated, the ghetto jail.
a telescopic lens was being secretly constructed for him according to a sketch he prepared.
When completed, the lens performed satisfactorily, but was heavy and awkward to carry, Mendel was happy, because he could now photograph from a distance and from hiding places.
Mendel showed particular interest in recording the activities of youth organisations in the ghetto.
All was open to him, the young people trusted him and Mendel discovered suddenly smiling faces, faith in the future, and care for fellow men. There were no longer orphanages and old people’s homes in the ghetto, and so he photographed the children in the workshops to which the entire population was mobilised.
Mendel infiltrated the parties of the ghetto elite, photographed their shameful mode of living, which was a mockery of the sufferings of the starving population.
generously distributed copies of his photographs, he asked for no payments he let the pictures be kept by as many people as possible.
With the Red Army advancing on the eastern front, Mendel knew that he must now hide his precious negatives in a safe place. Mendel made a quick selection of negatives, packed the tin cans in a wooden crate.
With the help of a friend he took out a window sill in his apartment, removed some bricks, placed the crate in the hollow, then replaced the sill. The task was accomplished.
He could no longer develop the film, the ghetto was almost empty.
Trains left twice a day for an unknown destination, one of the last to leave was Mendel, his camera hidden under his coat. Several days later the Gestapo found out about his activities when they found in some abandoned flats prints of his photographs – the definitive proof of their own crimes. Mendel was sent to the Konigs Wusterhausen labour camp, in the Reich where he secretly continued photographing, but not developing and printing.
When, the war front advanced and came closer, and the prisoners of the camp were taken out on the death march, Grossman collapsed and died with his camera on him.
One of Mendel’s closest friends Nahman Zonabend remained in the Lodz ghetto until its liberation. Although the Nazis kept him under constant surveillance, he succeeded in saving the archives of the Judenrat, and he concealed the documentary treasure, including some of Mendel’s photographs, at the bottom of a well.
Also the photographs taken by Mendel Grossman were used in the book With a Camera in the Ghetto, published in America in 1977.
This image was one of the several images taken by Mendel Grossman in a Jewish Ghetto. In the image we can see two boys who look like they are playing. On first glance of the picture we immediately assume that they are imitating what they see being happened to their own kind, at first I thought that he was imitating how he says Jewish people being treated by the Nazis. When completing the research behind this picture we then get to find out that in these Jewish Ghetto there were Jewish police in charge of the Jews, the Jewish police tended to be more wealthier and they policed the poorer Jews. From this contextual information we establish that the boy in the uniform is a wealthier boy and his parents were more than likely part of the Jewish police, we also assume that the boy he is pretending to police is part of the poorer Jews.
The smug grin portrayed on the wealthier boys face shows to us that he is impressed by being the wealthier side of the Jews, by playing this game he most likely feels as though he had great importance within the Jewish community. Although, the game they are playing is just pretend we being to see the effects that the social environment children are in have. The difference in facial expressions shown by these boys has real meaning because we can establish the difference in feelings between the wealthier and poorer people.
Grossman has structured this image well because we can see the foreground and background of this image. In the background of the image we can see the type of living conditions the Jews had to experience as the buildings look old and we can associate them with poorer places. The foreground is mainly the two boys playing, the foreground is the main aspect of this image so he has structured it well as we are looking at the foreground mainly rather than the background. The foreground tells the story but the background helps us establish the conditions they are living in. When looking at the image the main feature that stands out to me is the weapon that the boy is holding, this weapon is associated with violence which opens up the idea of the way the Jews were treated back in the 1940s.
Mendel Grossman documented these types of images because he was Jewish himself, he wanted people to realise the efforts that the Jewish people had to go through. This image links to this because it shows what children pick up and the way that they show the things they see. Grossman was very secretive about his work because the Nazi's didn't want people knowing how they were treating the Jews. When beginning this adventure of photographing the Jews pain and struggle he was part of a organisation who wanted to express these views around the world. I think that Grossman thought that the Jews would survive this period of time because he wanted to show people what Jewish people had gone through. The majority of Jews hadn't survived this period so his images were not used to the full extent that they could've been. Grossman's images have a very strong meaning and document the struggle of the Jews well as we feel for them when looking at his images.
