Roman Vishniac citations

“I read the first edition of 'Mein Kampf' when it came out in 1923 and even then I knew Hitler meant what he said. I knew the history of anti-Semitism going back for centuries, and I knew all about pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. When I grew up and whent to school in Moscow, I experienced anti-Semitism and the restrictions on where Jews could live and work. Hitler systemized anti-Semitism. Pogroms are my business… Oh yes, I could be a professor of anti-Semitism.”

“Nature, God, or whatever you want to call the creator of the universe comes through the microscope clearly and strongly”

“You can't teach biology with a bottle containing dead animals and organisms.”

“My friends assured me that Hitler’s talk was sheer bombast,” Vishniac said in 1955. “But I replied that he would not hesitate to exterminate those people when he got around to it. And who was there to defend them? I knew I could be of little help, but I decided that, as a Jew, it was my duty to my ancestors, 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.”

“Concentration camp money… It was a German sadism that invented it. Can you do anything with it? Yes, you can cry.”

“The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator.”

“[The Jews who roamed through Moscow looking for work] had a special kind of face … a special kind of whisper and a special kind of footstep … They were like hunted animals.”

“Even before the concentration camps, I felt it was my duty to my ancestors to preserve a world which might cease to exist.”

“The Jews of the shtetls that Tolstoy remembered were saints… the people I photographed were saints. So now, in 1983, I tell the world: When you learn about Goethe, don't forget to study the Holocaust, too.”

“…can you call a farm with a dozen geese a farm? Still, it was a little better for the Jews in Czechoslovakia. There were only two pogroms there. What's two pogroms?”