Primary Sources: The Holocaust: Photographs

"The Auschwitz Album is the only surviving visual evidence of the process leading to the mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is a unique document and was donated to Yad Vashem by Lilly Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier."

This website consists of over 4000 images from the Henryk Ross collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. You can search for images by theme or build your own groupings by using the My Collections link. Help us build this site by adding your own tags to the images to assist other users with searching. The tag field appears on the right-hand side of each image. If you are a student or a teacher, follow the Teachers and Students link to access the four lesson plans we have prepared for use in your classroom, or check out the Contemporary Connections page to help your class tackle modern human rights issues.

The collection contains photographs primarily taken by Mendel Grossman in Łódź, Poland prior to and during the war. The prewar photographs document the Grossman family, including Mendel’s sister Rozka, and his parents Shmuel and Chana. His wartime photographs document daily life in the Łódź ghetto, and including street scenes, deportations, and activities of the Zionist youth group Noʻar ha-Tsiyoni. Many of his wartime photographs feature his extended family, including his nephew Jankush Freitag. Postwar photographs document Rozka Grossman and her husband Moshe Zilbersztajn's (Zilbar) family in Israel.

The Wiener Holocaust Library has a collection of 40,000 images of the Holocaust and related subjects originating from private and institutional collections. They form a valuable resource for historians, researchers and educators and are regularly used by the media, publishers and film producers.