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Mendel (Menahem) Grosman (June 27, 1913? 1917?, Gorzkowic, Poland – April 16, 1945, vicinity of Sachsenhausen, Germany) was a Polish Jewish artist and photographer known for his clandestine documentary work in the Łódź Ghetto.

Biography

The prewar years

In the ghetto

Grosman found employment on the staff of the Population Statistics Department of the Ghetto Administration, taking official photographs when otherwise a Jew's posessing a camera was prohibited and punishable by death. His position in the department gave him access to photographic materials and a darkroom. Unofficially, however, he took photographs documenting the privations and inhumane conditions of ghetto existence. When the ghetto's liquidation was imminent, he hid some ten thousand negatives so these could later be smuggled out. It is estimated that these negatives numbered over ten thousand.

Upon the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto in 1944, he was sent to the Königs Wusterhausen labor camp, he continued photographing, though without the possibility of developing and printing. When in 1945 the camp was evacuated upon the approach of the front, the exhausted Grosman collapsed and died on the death march.

The fate of the photos

After the ghetto's liquidation, Grosman's friend Nachman Zonabend, who had worked in the Ghetto Administration's postal service, was among the Jewish labor squad charged with removing the traces of Nazi activity. He secured materials of the ghetto's archives, some of which included Grosman's photographs.

After the war, Grosman's sister returned to the ghetto and located the negatives, which were smuggled out to Mandatory Palestine. However, most were lost when the kibbutz where they were kept was overrun by enemy forces during the Israeli War of Independence.

Exhibitions

"Mendel Grosman – A View from Within: Drawings and Photographs, Lodz Between the Wars", Miriam Novitch Art Gallery, Ghetto Fighters' House, Western Galilee, Israel. Spring 2006 (ongoing).

References

Ben-Menahem, Arieh, Mendel Grossman [sic] entry in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, vol. 2, pp. 622-623. Illustration
Ben-Menachem, Arieh and Pnina Rosenberg, Mendel Grosman – A View from Within: Drawings and Photographs, Lodz Between the Wars, exhibition catalogue, bilingual English–Hebrew edition. Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, 2005.
Gronczewska Anna, Co dzień walczyli o życie [Rachela and Lolek Grynfeld] [in:] "Kocham Łódź" (add. to "Polska. Dziennik Łódzki), no 196, 2012.08.24, pp. 6-7.