Biographical History

Mendel Grosman (1913-1945) was a Jewish-Polish artist and photographer. Growing up in a Hasidic family in Łódź, he began capturing the city’s Jewish cultural and social life as a young professional in the late 1930s.

Upon the German occupation of Poland, Grosman and his family were interned in the newly established Łódź Ghetto (Ghetto Litzmannstadt). He found work in the photo section of the Jewish Council's statistics department, tasked with documenting the Council's work for the German Ghetto Administration and taking photos for identity cards.

His position as an official photographer allowed him to secretly and prolifically document the life and death of the ghetto inhabitants. At great personal risk, he distributed and hid as many prints and negatives as he could to preserve them for posterity.

When the ghetto was liquidated in 1944, Grosman was deported to a subcamp of Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Königs Wusterhausen. Shortly before the end of the war, he was shot on a death march north of Berlin.

Lajb Maliniak (1908-1945) was a Jewish-Polish photographer based in Łódź. Between 1940 and 1941, he ran a photo studio (“Foto-Kasprowy”) in the ghetto and worked alongside Mendel Grosman in the photo section of the Jewish Council's statistics department. His ultimate fate is unknown.

Scope/Content

The collection comprises 22 photos by Mendel Grosman and 11 photos by Lajb Maliniak. Another 11 photos cannot be clearly assigned at present.

The images document facilities established and run by the Jewish Council of the Łódź Ghetto. They show production sites and offices set up to provide forced labor for the German occupiers, as well as health care sites for ghetto inhabitants.

All images appear to have been taken by their respective authors in their capacity as official ghetto photographers. At least four of the pictures have been used in official albums or reports produced on behalf of the Jewish Council.

33 prints come with the photographers’ stamps on the verso, allowing for attribution of authorship. Nearly all images have the handwritten annotation ‘Hala’ on the verso, a Polish diminutive for ‘Helen’. Further notes on some images were added later by Wiener Library staff.