seven, he photographed the leg of a cockroach mag-
nified 150 times. In 1914, Vishniac entered Sha-
nyavsky University in Moscow where he specialized
in biology and earned his doctorate in zoology. He
became an assistant professor of biology there and
did graduate work in endocrinology but soon en-
rolled in a three-year medical course that the Russian
government sponsored to relieve the shortage of
doctors as a result of World War I. During that
time, he joined political protests and was arrested
and sentenced to death for treason. In what Vishniac
always called a miracle, his life was spared by the
climactic events of the Russian Revolution in 1917.
However, after the Bolsheviks overthrew the govern-
ment, the Vishniac family suffered. By 1918 his par-
ents and sister headed for Constantinople. In what
would foreshadow later bravery in Nazi Berlin and
throughout Eastern Europe, Vishniac, disguised as a
Bolshevik, gained safe passage for his family. In 1920
he finished his medical studies and was awarded the
M.D. degree. His family meanwhile had traveled
from Constantinople through Italy to Berlin where,
making the trip by way of newly-independent Lat-
via, he joined them. There he obtained a Latvian
passport, which he held until 1946 when he became
an American citizen.
Vishniac spent 19 years in Berlin where he mar-
ried in 1921 and had two children, a son, born in
1922, and a daughter, born in 1926. Caring for his
extended family, he performed numerous unskilled
jobs including working in a dairy store and an
automobile factory. He completed the Ph.D. work
in Oriental Art at the University of Berlin, but the
Nazis withheld the diploma. With other physicians,
he carried on a program of biological research,
specializing in the study of optics and the behavior
of light, which ultimately enabled him to work out a
system for using polarized light to reveal the inter-
nal structure of living creatures under the micro-
scope. Meanwhile, he supplemented his income as
both a portrait and a news photographer.
As the political climate in Germany was changing,
in 1936, Vishniac began an extraordinary life jour-
ney—a series of travels from the Baltic Sea to the
Carpathian Mountains, during which he covered
5,000 miles to photograph what was to be the last
pictorial record of the Jews in Eastern Europe. ‘‘I
decided that, as a Jew, it was my duty to my ances-
tors, who grew up among the very people who were
being threatened, to preserve—in pictures, at least—
a world that might soon cease to exist.’’ Carrying a
Leica for interior shots and a Rolleiflex for exteriors,
Vishniac journeyed through Poland, Lithuania, Lat-
via, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, speaking Yid-
dish and taking thousands of pictures, always
when his subjects were unaware that he was doing
so. Posing as a fabric salesman to explain his pre-
sence and the suitcases in which he kept equipment,
he was befriended by people he met along the way.
When he ran out of money, he returned to work in
Berlin and then began the cycle over again. The
authorities tried their best to prevent anyone with
a camera from photographing so, under constant
threat, he was arrested multiple times, his cameras
confiscated, and films destroyed. He learned to
carryahiddencameraandalargeroneasadecoy.
Out of 16,000 photographs, he estimated all but
2,000 were lost. When he later traveled to America,
Vishniac sewed negatives into his clothing, but most
of his remaining body of work was left behind with
his father who was hiding from the Nazis in Cler-
mont-Ferrand, France. Kept under floorboards or
behind picture frames on walls, these photographs
were eventually saved and brought to America.
These images allow today’s public to glimpse the
world of the shtetl, a world that is gone forever. In
vibrant communities throughout Europe, we see
ordinary people—a learned tzaddik (holy man)
wearing a tallis (prayer shawl) and praying, Yeshiva
students endlessly discussing the Talmud, and inno-
cent children at play. In aNew York Timesinterview
in 1983, Vishniac remembered:
In the 1930s I am living in Berlin and I say that Hitler will
destroy the Jews. I am told it will not happen. Maybe a
few hundred. Not more. But I know that I am right. So I do
this...and when I’m taking these pictures, I feel that I am
the witness who has to tell the next generation the truth.
On November 10, 1938, Vishniac marched in a
Nazi uniform to record the events of Kristallnacht
(Night of Broken Glass), after which Jewish life as all
knew it came to a swift termination. With anti-Semit-
ism raging in Germany, Vishniac sent his wife and
children to Sweden where Mrs. Vishniac’s parents
settled after fleeing from Riga. By 1924 his sister
had married and moved to France. When France
fell to the Nazis, Vishniac was there with his parents.
The police arrested him as a stateless person on the
grounds that Latvia had been absorbed by Russia
and therefore did not exist. He spent three months in
Du Richard concentration camp in the Loire Valley.
In all, he was imprisoned 11 times. Soon afterward,
Vishniac arranged for his wife and children to meet
him in Lisbon from where they sailed in December
1940 for New York. A polyglot with eight languages,
Vishniac, however, spoke no English. Getting a stea-
dy job was difficult. He turned to freelance portrait
photography, with his clientele mostly Russian immi-
grants. Able to eke out only a meager living, one day
he decided to visit Albert Einstein at Princeton toVISHNIAC, ROMAN