Roman Vishniac

Quotes

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

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