My Secret Camera - Hardcover

Frank Dabba Smith; Howard Jacobson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0711214778 ISBN 13: 9780711214774

Publisher: Frances Lincoln, 2000

Synopsis

Mendel Grossman, one of the many Jews imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto during World War II, was driven by a passion to bear witness to the human suffering that was going on around him. He secretly photographed people and events in the ghetto, leaving a historical record. In this photographic information book, the reader is taken on a journey with Grossman and his camera. The text emphasizes hope for the future, rather than the suffering of the past.

About this title

About the Author:

Frank Dabba Smith was born in California. He studied Linguistic Anthropology at Berkeley (BA Hons) and qualified as a teacher. He was ordained as a rabbi at Leo Baeck College, London, in 1994. Mendel Grossman was born in Lodz in 1917. After the occupation of Poland by the German Army in September 1939, he joined the underground in the town. Forced to live in the Lodz ghetto he used his position in the statistics department to obtain the material needed to take photographs. By hiding his camera in his raincoat, Grossman was able to take secret photographs of scenes in the ghetto. Grossman continued to take photographs after he was deported to the Konigs Wusterhausen labour camp. Mendel Grossman died while in the camp in 1945. After the war his hidden negatives were discovered and his work was published in the book, With a Camera in the Ghetto (1977).

From Publishers Weekly:

Grossman, a Polish Jew, was forced into the Lodz ghetto at its inception in May 1940. For the next four years, until the ghetto was destroyed, Grossman used his privileges as a photographer for the ghetto administration to covertly take thousands of pictures documenting life in the ghetto. The 17 photographs on these pages show the suffering so copiously described by historians and survivorsAsoldiers march through emptied streets; freighted with bundles and rucksacks, heavily dressed people head toward what is surely deportation; a solitary child clutches a wire fence. They are heartbreaking. But even more wrenching are the photos of less iconic scenes. Readers see a team of workers smiling as they bake Passover matzoh and teenagers laughing at some delicious joke. Unfortunately, Smith, a rabbi and a photographer, is not content to let the photos speak for themselves, and he scripts a brief narrative, delivered as if by Grossman. It is numbingly formulaic ("My own pain does not matter. I must show what the Nazis are doing to my people. My pictures will tell the real story, even if I die"), and although he explains how the photographs survived despite Grossman's death, nowhere does he comment on how he arrived at his text, for instance, if the names he assigns some figures are real. For all his piety, his commentary underserves Grossman's work. Ages 8-up. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0711214778
• ISBN 13: 9780711214774
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 40