Mendel Grossman

Mordka Mendel Grossman, commonly known as Mendel Grossman, (born on 27 June 1913 in Gorzkowice, Piotrków Governorate, Russian Empire, today Poland), was a Polish Jewish photographer known for documenting life in the Łódź Ghetto, Litzmannstadt Ghetto by the Germans, during the Holocaust. While employed in the Statistical Department of the Judenrat, he produced official photographs and also secretly photographed the conditions of daily life of the Jewish people. Before the ghetto’s liquidation in 1944, he hid thousands of negatives. Some of his photographs survived and are held by institutions including the Ghetto Fighters’ House and Yad Vashem.[1] He died on 30 April 1945, during the death marches.

Youth and job in Łódź (1918-1939)

He was born in Gorzkowice to a Jewish Hasidic family as a son of Szmul Dawid Grossman and Hanna. After the First World War, his family settled at 58 Wschodnia Street in Łódź. As a child, Grossman began drawing portraits and scenes from Jewish life. He started to take photographs, at first as an amateur, then as a professional. He also colored photographs using aniline dyes. In the 1930s, Grossman became associated with the Jewish Theatre in Łódź, photographing performances, actors, and actresses. He also knew a number of writers, poets, musicians, and painters. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, he photographed performances by Habima Theatre during its visit to Łódź. Grossman photographed the performances backstage on his own initiative. The results were the wonderfully inspired forerunner for all of his work in the ghettos and camps ~ Man in Motion ~ leading to the reverent archive of photos more aptly named as a collection ~ Motion Towards Death.[2]

The Litzmannstadt Ghetto (1939-1944)

The Nazis put him and his family in the Łódź Ghetto in 1939, where he found work as a photographer, making identification cards and documenting the work that his fellow inmates did in the ghetto. The ghetto administration used these photographs to document labour and productivity as an argument for trying to convince the Nazis to treat them better. Together with fellow photographers, Ross, Maliniak, and Ben Menachem, Grossman produced 27 albums with photos, collages, graphics, text, and modern design depicting the ‘great productivity’ of the Łódź ghetto.[3]

Grossman also photographed the deportations from the Łódź Ghetto to the Chełmno extermination camp in 1942 and 1944. His surviving photographs include images of columns of Jews being marched toward Radegast station and of deportees boarding trains guarded by German personnel and Jewish ghetto police. According to later testimony, friends concealed Grossman in a cement storeroom, allowing him to photograph one deportation scene through a hole in a board.[4] Grossman also hid a camera in his coat during the day, taking photographs of the living conditions in the ghetto. He photographed hunger, Jewish people lining up for food and the search for food and coal. He also made several photographs of controversial figure, Chaim Rumkowski, who was appointed by Nazi Germany as the Head of the Judenrat.[5] Grossman took these photographs at great risk to his life, not only because the Gestapo suspected him, but also because of his weak heart.

Some of his photographs assisted people in identifying the graves of their loved ones. His negatives became part of the surviving visual documentation of the Holocaust. Grossman distributed many of his photographs; those he was unable to pass, he tried to hide. In August 1944, shortly before the final liquidation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, he hid approximately 10,000 negatives showing scenes from the Ghetto. In the ghetto, he lived together with his family at 55 Marynarskiej street.

Death

Deported to a labor camp in Koenigs Wusterhausen, he stayed there until 16 April 1945. Ill and exhausted, he was shot by Nazis during a forced death march, still holding on to his camera.[6]

Archive and survival of photographs

Only a fraction of Grossman’s photographic work survived the war. During the final months of the Łódź Ghetto, before his deportation, he tried to protect the material by separating it into different forms of safekeeping: some prints were left with friends, while other photographs and negatives were hidden in the ghetto. Pinchas Shaar recalled that Grossman concealed his negatives and prints in clay jars buried in an abandoned bunker. His assistant, Ben-Menachem, gave a different version, placing the material in tin cans inside a wooden box hidden behind a window sill in Grossman’s apartment. After the war, Shaar and Grossman’s sister recovered some of the archive and brought it to Israel, where many of the surviving materials were eventually lost during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.[4] A further group of Grossman-related material survived through Nachman “Natek” Zonabend, another friend from the Łódź Ghetto. In 1948, Zonabend donated a large collection of ghetto materials to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The donation comprised more than 2,000 items in Polish, Yiddish and German, including photographs, photo albums, newspapers, maps, identity documents and other records from the ghetto.[7]

The wartime series feature daily life in the Łódź ghetto, including family members, street scenes, deportations, and activities of Zionist youth groups such as Noʻar ha-Tsiyoni.[8] These photographs are now located in the Museum of Holocaust and Resistance at the Ghetto Fighters House in Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, Israel, as well as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.[9][10]

Editions of Grossman's photos

  • M. Grossman, With the Camera in the Ghetto, Tel-Aviv 1970: Ghetto Fighters' House and Hakibutz Hameuchad Publishing House (published in English, French and Hebrew). Second Edition 1972
  • H. Loewy, "Fotogeschichte" 1991, Heft 38.
  • My Secret Camera: Life in the Lodz Ghetto, photographs by Mendel Grossman, text by Frank Dabba Smith, introduction by Howard Jacobson, ISBN 0-7112-1477-8, Great Britain 2000: Frances Lincoln Ltd.

References

  1. ^ "About the Yad Vashem Photograph Collections". yadvashem.org.
  2. ^ Grossman, Mendel; Meron, Peter (1977). With a Camera in the Ghetto. Schocken Books. ISBN 9780805236453.
  3. ^ Löw, Andrea (September 2015). Documenting as a ‘Passion and Obsession’: Photographs from the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto. Vol. 48, no. 3. Cambridge University Press. p. 391. doi:10.1017/S0008938915000801.
  4. ^ a b jamesmmcardle (2017-04-30). "April 30: Preservation". On This Date in Photography: by James Mcardle. Retrieved 2026-06-15.
  5. ^ Barros, Antonia Tejeda (2025-07-31). "Documenting the Łódź Ghetto Through the Photographs by Mendel Grossman". Studia Humanitatis Journal. 5 (2): 128–163. doi:10.33732/shj.v5i2.158. ISSN 2792-3967.Rumkowski’s controversial speech with the command ‘Give me your children’ was delivered on September 4, 1942. Dawid Sierakowiak writes that same day in his diary (five notebooks, originally written in Polish): “The mood of panic is intensifying by the second. All kinds of rumors are repeated from lips to lips that we should expect the worst. At four Rumkowski and Warszawski... gave speeches on Firemen’s Square (13 Lutomierska Street)” Jósef Zelkowicz copied Rumkowski’s speech in his 345-page manuscript (written in Yiddish, translated as In These Nightmarish Days): “I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands... I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, hand them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!” (...) “I must perform this difficult and bloody operation –I must cut off limbs in order to save the body itself! (...) I come to you like a bandit, to take from you what you treasure most in your hearts! (...) A broken Jew stands before you”.
  6. ^ Sierakowiak, Dawid; Adelson, Alan; Turowski, Kamil (1998). The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. Oxford University Press. pp. 269–270. ISBN 978-0-19-512285-5.
  7. ^ Barros, Antonia Tejeda (2025-07-31). "Documenting the Łódź Ghetto Through the Photographs by Mendel Grossman". Studia Humanitatis Journal. 5 (2): 128–163. doi:10.33732/shj.v5i2.158. ISSN 2792-3967.
  8. ^ "Photo Collections". collections.yadvashem.org.
  9. ^ https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn537115?rsc=265868&cv=0&x=799&y=1098&z=2.2e-4
  10. ^ Gerrard, Nicci (2000-04-23). "The man who told the world". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2026-06-15.

Bibliography

  • Arie ben-Menachem, Grossman Mordka Mendel, [in:] Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 2, New York 1990 (phot.).
  • Andrzej Kempa, Marek Szukalak, Żydzi dawnej Łodzi. Słownik biograficzny, vol. IV, Łódź 2004, pp. 62–63 (phot.; bibliography)
  • Andrzej Kempa, Marek Szukalak, The Biographical Dictionary of the Jews from Lodz, Lodz 2006: Oficyna Bibliofilów, ISBN 83-87522-83-X, p. 86 (Mordka Mendel Grossman's biographical note).
  • Unsere einziger Weg is Arbeit. Das Getto in Łódź 1940-1944, Frankfurt a. Main 1990 (here M. Grossman's death-date: 30 April 1945).
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