Fathers mothers give me your children! Perec Zylberberg was due to be deported lying

Fathers, mothers, give me your children!” Perec Zylberberg was due to be deported, lying in his hospital bed. But he jumped from the second-floor window, just like the people in one Ross image, and escaped. “I don’t know how I did it,” he says, “but I suppose I just didn’t like the set-up.”Helen Aronson had already lost her father, Motus Chhmura, in her home town of Pabianice, when the Jews were rounded up to be sent to Lodz and the children sent to Chelmno to be killed “They asked for volunteers to escort the children. But on 4 September 1942, he said to inhabitants in the ghetto square: “They are asking us to give up the best we possess. It was lying in a hospital bed during the Gehsperre, a week-long curfew in 1942 when the Nazis demanded 24,000 children for deportation.

Rumkowski got it down to 20,000, and arranged for children to be substituted by the elderly or sick. These pictures look like Nazi propaganda.” They’re disproportionate, says someone else Misleading. Not the whole truth.The truth, they say, was soup so thin that potato peelings were precious, and being so weak you couldn’t speak without your eyes watering. “I’ve realised I won’t find them in these pictures, because these people don’t represent the majority of experience in the ghetto.

Though he catalogued his archive before his death and captioned many images – a hanging in Lodz central square, a deportation – he hardly gives any information for the thousands of images of the elite.This, and the overwhelming presence of the smiling, sunny ghetto residents, bother many in the room. Suzanne Pearson, who was sent to the UK by her German Jewish parents in 1939, came to see if she could spot them in Ross’s archive, because they were sent to Lodz before being killed in Chelmno She had been hopeful, but now she’s not. Two years ago she decided she wanted more space, but as its price had more than doubled, she opted to release some equity and invest in buy-to-let.She bought a two-bed flat in Kentish Town where she now lives, and rents out her old home. Here are their wives and children, eating, drinking and not looking too unhealthy. Here, most shockingly, is a young child dressed up in a child-size ghetto-police uniform, play-hustling his companions along with a stick.More than half of Ross’s photographs focus on the “protected” class, and by the easy familiarity of the poses, it’s clear that Ross must have been one of them This could explain his attitude to the pictures.