Before the firestorm: Exhibit of Roman Vishniac's photos honors a culture that no longer exists

By Phoebe Mitchell
Staff Writer

Published on July 18, 2008

The photograph shows a young boy carrying a large sack stuffed with hay on his back, its weight bending him over as he walks along. His eyes hold both the petulance of a child not happy about doing chores and a sad resignation that belongs to a much older face.

When Mara Vishniac, age 9, saw this picture for the first time some 70 years ago, as her father, photographer Roman Vishniac, developed it in his Berlin darkroom, she asked him, "Why does this boy carry such a large load on his back? Shouldn't he use a cart?"

Like his daughter, visitors to an exhibit of Roman Vishniac's black-and-white photographs, now on view at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, will wonder at the story behind the people caught by his lens. Between 1935 and 1938, Vishniac took thousands of photographs of pre-World War II Jews, many of them children, living in the impoverished cities, towns and villages of Eastern Europe.

The exhibition, "Children of a Vanished World: Photographs by Roman Vishniac," is on display at the center through Aug. 31.

Underlying Vishniac's photographs, which depict children and their families in their daily routines - playing, working, studying, eating - is the realization that, with the Nazi reign of terror about to begin, their world will soon change horribly and forever.

As Nora Gerard, program director at the book center, put it, what makes Vishniac's images compelling, in part, is "what's not in the frame as well as what is."

Pointing to a photograph of two young girls, their innocent faces framed by a dark, stone courtyard, Gerard said, "You don't know what happened to these children."

Aprile Gallant, curator of prints, drawings and photographs at Smith College, said that Vishniac's work is important because it serves as a "social document of a culture that no longer exists."

"Nobody could have predicted the horror of the Holocaust, said Gallant, but at the time Vishniac took his photos the daily life of Eastern European Jews was already under constant threat. The genius in his photographs is revealed in the darkness that permeates his subjects, even the smiling children.

'These are our people'

Born in Russia in 1897, Vishniac took the photographs while on assignment for the Berlin-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which aimed to document the deteriorating conditions of East European Jews in the wake of the Great Depression, with an eye to raising money to help those in need.

His haunting photographs were published in "Children of a Vanished World" (University of California Press, 1999), a book edited by his daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, who lives in California and is now in her 80s, and translated by Miriam Hartman Flacks, an author and native Yiddish speaker.

Fifty of these pictures, along with a selection of nursery rhymes, songs, poems, and chants for children's games that accompanied Vishniac's photographs in the book, were shown in New York City in 2000 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, which organized the traveling exhibit that is now on view in Amherst.

Drawn to the images of traditional Jewish life, Vishniac visited the ghettos and shtetlekhs - Yiddish for towns - of Poland, Romania, Russia, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania, taking more than 16,000 photographs of the communities' poorest members. His pictures show people, usually alone or in small groups, in their homes, at school or walking, often on cold and desolate city streets.

Along the way, he had to deal with the suspicions of some orthodox Jews, who were opposed to being photographed on religious grounds.

His travels were not without danger: Vishniac sometimes posed as a traveling fabric salesman, a disguise that didn't prevent his frequent arrest by police for taking pictures, a practice that by then was forbidden Jews. He often hid his camera inside his coat, fitting the lens through an enlarged opening.

As the conditions for Jews worsened under Nazi rule, Vishniac made plans to get the photographs safely out of Berlin with the help of family and friends headed for the United States. In 1939, he sent his family, including daughter Mara, to Sweden, while he remained in France, where he was eventually arrested and sent to an internment camp for several months.

The family was finally reunited in Lisbon, Portugal, moving to New York City in 1940. Of the 16,000 photographs taken in Eastern Europe by Vishniac, only 2,000 photographs reached America.

He died in 1990 in New York City at the age of 92.

Maya Benton of New York City, an art historian and director and curator of the Vishniac photo collection, said he is one of the best social-documentary photographers of that period. "He had a way of connecting with those he photographed," she said, especially the children. "They really come alive."

In the book she published of her father's photographs, Kohn writes: "My father felt certain that the poor he had visited in the shtetlekh, many of who had become his dear friends, would not be able to survive. 'I wanted,' he said, 'at least to save their faces.' "