Leave Taking before Deportation

Mendel Grossman was a Polish photographer born in Staszów and raised in Lódz. In 1939, the Grossman family was imprisoned in the Lódz ghetto, where Nazi guards assigned him to take identity-card photographs. With access to a camera, Grossman secretly documented life in the ghetto. Between 1940 and 1944, he shot more than ten thousand images, which he hid in the ghetto before his deportation to the Sachsenhausen work camp. He died on a forced march as the camp was liquidated. After the war, Grossman’s sister and friends recovered his negatives and brought them to Israel. Grossman’s surviving negatives were printed and published in a 1977 as With a Camera in the Ghetto and in 2000 as My Secret Camera: Life in the Lodz Ghetto.