Roman Vishniac

"Vishniac came back from his trips... with a collection of photographs that has become an important historical document, for it gives us a last minute look at the human beings he photographed just before the fury of the Nazi brutality exterminated them. Vishniac took with him on this self-imposed assignment... a rare depth of understanding and a native sons warmth and love for his people. ~ Edward Steichen, ex-director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in the 1950s."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 photographers thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator."

"I met him in 1966, and discovered how undiscovered he was. -- Cornell Capa"