On this day in 1910, photographer Henryk Ross was born in Warsaw, Poland. Ross was tasked with producing identity and propaganda photos for the Łódź Ghetto, but instead, he risked his life to take unauthorized photos documenting life in the ghetto. Before World War II, Ross had worked as a sports photographer for the Polish Press. In 1940, he was living in Łódź, Poland when the Nazis forced over 160,000 Jews into the Łódź Ghetto. It was from here that Ross was made a photographer for the Jewish Administration's Statistics Department. He produced identity photographs for ghetto residents, documented unidentified corpses, and took propaganda images. Ross was forbidden from taking unofficial photographs, but he still used his Leica 35mm camera to chronicle real life in the ghetto. “Having an official camera, I was able to capture all the tragic periods in the Łódź Ghetto. I did it knowing that if I were caught my family and I would be tortured and killed.” Ross would hide his camera beneath his coat, opening it slightly to snap photographs. He took both portraits of people at home and on the streets. His photos show children collapsed from hunger and scavenging for scraps, a young boy pulling a hearse, workers toiling in factories, workers handling human excrement in the absence of a sewer system, and the mass deportations to concentration camps. Ross married his wife, Stefania, in the ghetto in 1941. She assisted him with his photography, often serving as a lookout. To photograph the deportations to concentration camps, Ross would open the door of his house at his wife’s signal and capture images of those selected for deportation as they walked away. “I managed to get into the railway station in the guise of a cleaner… I watched as the transport left. I heard shouts. I saw the beatings. I saw how they were shooting at them, how they were murdering them, those who refused. Through a hole in a board on the wall of the storeroom, I took several pictures.”Ross also recorded moments of joy in the ghetto: couples kissing, people playing in meadows and trees, gardening, and dinner parties. Ross hid his negatives before the liquidation of the ghetto began in 1944. In his own words: “I buried my negatives in the ground in order that there should be some record of our tragedy, namely the total elimination of the Jews from Łódź by the Nazi executioners. I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom.”Ross and his wife were among the 877 recorded survivors in the ghetto when the Red Army liberated it in 1945. Ross photographed some of the celebration: a woman appeared to dance with a smiling Soviet soldier, and six freed Łódź Jews stood under the sign of the recently opened gate to the ghetto, uneasy but grinning.That same year, men, women, and even a boy gathered to help Ross dig up his negatives. Around 3,000, or about half, survived, the others damaged by water. After the war, Ross ran a photography business in Łódź and eventually emigrated to Israel with his wife in the late 1950s; they were poor in Israel, they spoke no Hebrew and remained haunted by their experience in Łódź.In 1961, Ross testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann where his surviving photos were used as evidence. He began to re-engage with his photographs, published a book, and worked on his archive, “The Last Journey of the Jews of Łódź.” Ross died on May 1, 1991, at the age of 81, in Israel.