Roman Vishniac Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

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.

Roman Vishniac
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.

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

Roman Vishniac
You can't teach biology with a bottle containing dead animals and organisms.
New York Times Magazine

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

Roman Vishniac
These are the faces of children I embraced and kissed and loved. I cannot imagine that they are dead, that none would survive... A million and a half children among the six million... But this I knew... I wanted to save their faces, not their ashes.

Roman Vishniac
... 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?

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

Roman Vishniac
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.

Roman Vishniac