One and a half million children were killed in the Holocaust.


 Today we remember one of them, and through him, we honor them all.


This child’s name was Yaakov Freitag, but his family lovingly called him Janusz or Jankele. For his uncle, the photographer Mendel Grossman, little Janusz came to represent all the children of the ghetto: hungry, sick, surrounded by death, and living each day under the shadow of deportation to the extermination camps.


In nearly every surviving photograph of Janusz, his uncle captured him in moments of eating: biting into a frozen carrot, sharing soup with Mendel, or enjoying a few sweet cherries.


Janusz Freitag was only six years old when he died of starvation in the Łódź ghetto in 1943. Most of his family also perished in the ghetto, including his parents who were murdered.


Before the final liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944, Mendel Grossman asked his friend Arie ben Menahem to help hide his collection of 10,000 negatives. Together, they placed part of it inside a wooden box and hid it in a hollow wall beneath a window in his apartment. Another portion, including prints and a camera, was hidden in a cellar with the help of another friend, Nachman Zonabend.


Grossman himself was shot and killed during a death march. Yet because of his brave decision to hide his work, the photographs he took – showing the final years of Janusz and the Jewish community of Łódź – survived and remain with us today.

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