On the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, around 1940-1944, a young boy starved to death, lying on the street and starving to death. Living conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were terrible; there was no running water or sewage system in large areas.

   On the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, around 1940-1944, a young boy starved to death, lying on the street and starving to death. Living conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were terrible; there was no running water or sewage system in large areas. More than 20% of the inhabitants died due to poor living conditions. The ghetto facilitated the Nazi regime's control over the Jews, depriving them of their property and putting them to work. German Jews were sent to ghettos in occupied Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, while Roma arrested in Austria were sent to ghettos in the east. The ghettos were surrounded by barbed wire and fences; in August 1944, most of the ghetto's remaining residents were sent to Auschwitz. When the Red Army liberated the ghetto on January 19, 1945, there were only 877 survivors in the camp.

　Henrik Roth buried about 6,000 photographic negatives of the ghetto in a field. When the war ended, he returned to dig up the painful truth he had captured: that the Nazis imprisoned thousands of Jews, living and dying in terrible conditions. Many were grateful that Henrik dared to take these photographs.

　Many of the photographs show the disgusting truth of the Jewish genocide. Some show corpses piled high, anxious children searching for food in the dirt, while others capture the remarkable resilience of people gripped by Nazi terror.

　Warsaw-born Henryk Ross worked as a sports photographer before World War II, and after the creation of the Lodz Ghetto, he was assigned to take identification and propaganda photographs in the ghetto's factories. This role provided the perfect cover for Henrik Ross, who secretly took a number of photographs of ghetto life.

　Before his death in 1991, Henrik Roth stated how and why he preserved the photographs: he wanted to preserve a historical record of his martyrdom in anticipation of the annihilation of the Polish Jews. When not working for the Nazi regime, Henrik Roth took pictures through holes in walls, through folds in his jacket, and in back streets where no one was looking.