A GHETTO NAMED BALUTY (2008)

Whose images are used in the film

A special chapter in the history of the wartime ghetto is the story of the Jewish ghetto authority which performed the Nazis' dirty work. It was feared, its members had privileges. Its main representative, Chaim Rumkowski, gradually placed himself in the omnipotent role of lord over life and death. He decided on who to select for the transports, and his ghetto police enforced the feared "Sperre" – the selection of tens of thousands of people, mainly children and the elderly, for deportation to the extermination camps.

Rumkowski liked to document his occasional good deeds in pictures taken by "his reporters". One such photographer, Henryk Ross, used his permission to move freely about the ghetto with a camera to create a unique collection of more than four thousand images showing diverse aspects of life in the ghetto.

"By coincidence, Ross's re-discovered legacy was exhibited in Prague's Langhans gallery not long after my first visit to Lodz. The exhibition was an important event involving various meetings with survivors. It was a lucky coincidence which greatly helped me to bring together the two main levels of the film about Baluty," says director Pavel Štingl.