A Vanished World, signed by Vishniac

First edition.

Signed and inscribed by Roman Vishniac: “It should not happen again Roman [and] Edith Vishniac 1985.”

This landmark book presents hundreds of photographs depicting Eastern European Jewry during the 1930s. A Russian Jew, Roman Vishniac began to take photographs of village life during the First World War. After moving to Berlin, Vishniac began to travel to Eastern Europe, visiting mountain villages and urban ghettos, taking thousands of photographs documenting the ever-more oppressed Jewish people. Within years most of them had been exterminated by the Nazis. Many of the photographs seem to have been taken secretly and thus provide a candid view of daily life. Some of Vishniac’s photographs had been published shortly after the Second World War as part of The Vanished World (1947), a volume including works by other photographers as well.

The present volume represents the culmination of Vishniac’s lifelong project and the most extensive published collection of his photographs. Photography giant Edward Steichen declared, “Vishniac took with him on this self-imposed assignment—besides this or that kind of camera and film—a rare depth of understanding and a native son’s warmth and love for his people. The resulting photographs are among photography’s finest documents of a time and place.”

The Foreword is by Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who writes, “Not to forget, not to allow oblivion to defeat memory: That is his obsession. Defying all dangers, surmounting all obstacles, he travels from province to province, from village to village, capturing slums and markets, a gesture here, a movement there, reflections of hope and despair, so that the victims will not wholly vanish into the abyss—so that they will live on, past torture and past massacre. And he has won the wager: They live still.”

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