Fatal Shots : Vishniac’s photos of doomed European Jews make for poignant viewing at University of Judaism

At the University of Judaism there is currently a stark reminder of the not-too-distant past when life was so hard for Jews that it seemed their religion and culture might not have a future.

The Platt Gallery is hosting, over these High Holy Days, an exhibit of photographs by Roman Vishniac, Jacob Riis and Arnold Eagle that is titled “Vanished but Not Vanquished: Photos of a Jewish World That Was.” The centerpiece of the small exhibit is a selection of 12 works by Vishniac, who secretly photographed everyday life in the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe just before they were wiped out during the Holocaust.

In addition, there are Riis photos from the turn of the century that document the squalid conditions in which Jewish immigrants worked and lived when they were first in this country. The Eagle works are of New York’s Orthodox community in the 1930s.

The exhibit appears during the time of year that for Jews is the most forward-looking. It is during this 10-day period--between the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur--that, according to Jewish tradition, God plans the year ahead for each individual.

It is the time, Jews say, when God inscribes one in the book of life.

But it is also, believes exhibit curator King Levin, a time for looking back at Jewish history.

“I think there was a time in my life when I didn’t fully understand these periods in our history,” said Levin, who loaned the photographs on display from his own collection. “But now I can look at these photographs, which seem like they are of a time so long ago, and I can put them into context. I can see them as a valuable part of our heritage.

“It’s a heritage, a history, like any family or business history. There are periods of success and periods of failure and emotional trauma. It’s what all comes together to tell the story of a people.”

The full story that the Vishniac photographs tell is not discernible at first glance. They are technically spectacular, black and white images from Krakow, Warsaw and other places where Jewish life once flourished. But in context, they are especially poignant.

The Russian-born Vishniac, who died last year at 92, was a zoologist specializing in microphotography--pictures taken through a microscope--in Berlin in the 1920s. From reading Hitler’s writings and observing the political scene, he was sure that the Holocaust was coming, but he was not able to convince even his Jewish friends.

Vishniac decided to make a photographic record of Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe, just in case it was indeed wiped out.

“I was unable to save my people, only their memory,” he later wrote.

In 1932, he began what was to be an eight-year, 5,000-mile journey to take his pictures in ghettos, schools and places of worship. He hid his cameras in fake sales cases, scarves and other places to conceal what he was doing from the Nazis and from fundamentalist Jews who objected to the use of modern devices.

He posed as a salesman and sometimes even as a Nazi soldier to get close to his subjects.

The photographs in the University of Judaism exhibit are from a portfolio of Vishniac’s favorites, according to Levin. They include that of a bearded rabbi clutching his books and walking down a street in Warsaw, the rain-swept entrance to the ghetto in Krakow, children studying in a country school and an old man by a fire in Carpathian Ruthenia. Under each is Vishniac’s commentary so that we learn, for example, that a grandfather and granddaughter standing on a Warsaw street are talking about her inability to find work because of a Nazi-instigated boycott against Jews.

After several scrapes with authorities, Vishniac escaped to France in 1939 and eventually made his way to New York. He stored the almost 16,000 negatives he had taken under the floorboards of a house in France and later had them shipped to New York. Only about 2,000 survived the trip--Vishniac was never able to find out what happened to the rest.

In the mid-1960s, famed photographer Cornell Capa met Vishniac “and discovered how undiscovered he was,” Capa said. Capa organized an exhibit of Vishniac’s documentary and microscopic work that led to Vishniac’s worldwide fame.

According to his friends and relatives, Vishniac suffered for the rest of his life the trauma of having photographed so many people who were wiped out. “They were all killed,” he says repeatedly in a videotape commentary that is being shown as part of the exhibition.

Like Vishniac, Levin first became interested in the technical aspects of photography. “For about 30 years I collected 19th-Century photography, daguerreotypes,” said Levin, 65, a semi-retired upholstery fabric dealer. “They were from when photography first burst on the scene and I was interested in that, and in history in general.

“It was only in later years that I allowed myself to go off in another direction in collecting.”

About two years ago, after consulting with a photography dealer in New York, he and his wife, Bea, bought the portfolio of Vishniac prints and works by other photographers who documented Jewish life. “I guess I don’t know why it took me until then, but I was always interested in Jewish affairs,” said Levin of Bel-Air. “I would look at these Vishniac photographs and cry like everyone else, thinking what happened to these people.”

He also was haunted by the story of his mother, who was sent to the United States from Poland before the war. She was the only member of her family to survive. “It was an astonishing quirk of fate, without which I, of course, would not be here,” Levin said.

Levin, who is on the university’s board, offered his photographs to the gallery after a Robert Rauschenberg exhibit planned for this time had to be postponed. Until the exhibit, he had never had the Vishniac photographs framed, keeping them instead in a portfolio. But Levin said he was not shying away from the emotion-laden photographs and that he has no trouble looking at them.

“They are not difficult to live with, I am quite proud of them,” he said. “Our history is full of tragedy, but we have to learn from the past and then go forward.

“There is an old saying, ‘It’s hard to be a Jew,’ and that is true sometimes. But it also has its exquisite moments and that is what you look forward to.”