On the streets of the ghetto in Lodz, Poland, the Jewish corpse bearers who died in July 1941 collected and transported the bodies of the dead Jews. More than 20% of the ghetto population died as a result of the harsh living conditions.

　　On the streets of the ghetto in Lodz, Poland, the Jewish corpse bearers who died in July 1941 collected and transported the bodies of the dead Jews. In early February 1940, the Germans established a ghetto in the north-east of Lodz. Approximately 160,000 Jews from Łódź were forcibly confined to a small area. The living conditions in the ghetto were miserable, with no running water or sewage system. Hard labor, overcrowding and starvation were the main features of life, and the overwhelming majority worked in German factories and received only a small food ration. More than 20% of the ghetto population died as a direct result of the harsh living conditions. In August 1944, the Germans deported all the surviving ghetto residents to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination center. Only a small group of 1,000 to 1,500 Jews remained in the Łódź ghetto.

　　Mendl Grossmann, a Polish ghetto photographer, was employed by the Statistics Bureau to take identity photographs. Thanks to his job, he was able to secretly photograph and record the daily lives of the ghetto residents, including Jewish families suffering from hunger, deportations, Zionist youth movements, executions, and the worsening conditions in the entire ghetto, from 1939 in the ghetto of Lodz, Poland. Just before the ghetto was sealed off in 1944, Mendel and his friends hid around 10,000 negatives and prints in several places. Mendel was later deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Berlin, and died in a forced march after the Nazis evacuated the concentration camp in 1945.

　　After World War II, his sister Fajje took the negatives out of hiding and sent them to Israel. The 10,000 negatives were lost when the kibbutz was occupied by Egypt during the War of Independence. Mendel's closest friend, Nahman Zohnabend, survived until the liberation of the ghetto and was able to preserve the archives of the Jewish League. Some of Mendel Grossman's photographs were included in the archival photographs that were left at the bottom of the well. After the war, the materials were taken out of Poland and are now stored in the Holocaust and Resistance Museum in Israel.