Essay Mendel Grossman

Essay

Mendel Grossman

This photo is from Lodz, Poland during world war 2. He was a Jewish photographer coming from a Hasidic family. During the outbreak of War he began to capture the horror in the ghetto, people suffering, their pain, struggles and death. He did this by hiding his camera under his coat photographing what took place in the ghetto during the Holocaust. He did this by keeping his hands in his pockets, which were cut open inside, and he thus could manipulate the camera. He directed the lens by turning his body in the direction he wanted, then slightly parted his coat, and clicked the shutter. He also noticed how the richer Jews lived a better life normally becoming the police in the ghetto, where the poor ones where treated terribly. This mimics what is happening in the photo where the children could possibly be mimicking there parents. He distributed copies hoping that some would survive so families could identify there dead. One way he did this was by taking out a window sill in his apartment, removed some bricks, placed the crate in the hollow, then replaced the sill. The task was accomplished. The negatives of his photographs hidden by him in the ghetto, were found by Mendel’s sister and sent to Israel, but most of them were lost during the War of Independence, when Egyptian troops captured the Nitzanim kibbutz. After the war this material was taken out of Poland. The archives were collected and are now housed in the Museum of Holocaust and Resistance at the Ghetto Fighters House in Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot Israel. In the end they were used in the book ' With a Camera in the Ghetto ' , published in 1977 America. 

In the photo there are two children in different clothes. One is shown in normal day wear and the other standing behind the other in a police or military outfit, with an arm band on his arm. The child in day wear is looking towards the ground were the one in uniform is holding what seems to be a wooden baton against his arm, with the other hand on the other child's shoulder, smiling at the camera. It seems that Mendel Grossman captured the two children playing a game not realising the horrors that it would foreshadow to come during the Holocaust. 

The location seems to be industrial shown by the large warehouse looking buildings and chimney in the background. You can tell from the shadows cast on to the faces of the boys that the photo was also taken during the daytime. 

Children tend to copy there surroundings when playing games as a result this is something that they must have seen happening in the ghetto. This was most likely seen due to the Nazi's invasion of Poland in 1939, when the ghetto was changed to make weaponry for the Nazi party. This means that the children would have seen the way the adults treated one another and so would start to copy it. Thinking that is was ok to copy due to the fact they were seeing the same thing everyday, when they did fully understand what they where doing. 

There are a couple of punctum's to this photo. The first being the chimney as to the viewer we would instantly think of the gas chambers where hundreds of thousand of Jews would have died. Implying that this could have been a chamber or something similar which creates a really uneasy feeling as the viewer would know that the children would have no idea what was truly happening.The next one could be the way the photo has been staged, you can tell this due to the smile on the child's face who is the 'prisoner'. However there is the darker undertone that the viewer knows that this is foreshadowing the way Jews were taken to concentration camps and/or gas chambers every day during the Holocaust.