Roman Vishniac, born in 1897 in Saint Petersburg, was a microbiologist, inventor, philosopher, university lecturer, art historian – and photographer. He already took his first photographs in 1906 showing the leg of a cockroach seen through a microscope. Because of the anti-Jewish pogroms following the October Revolution in 1917, his family left Russia and moved to Berlin. From there, Vishniac first of all went into exile in France in 1939. From 1933 he travelled through Eastern Europe with a hidden camera to “take photos and make films of the Jews in the ghettos and small towns. He was convinced, he said that Hitler had sentenced all the Jews of Europe to death and that while he could not rescue them, he could provide a picture for them for posterity.” said his daughter Mara to the later film-maker Erwin Leiser (born in 1923) – both of whom met in 1939 in a Swedish children’s home while living in exile.

Leiser's documentary, which was filmed 39 years later, concentrated on the photographs that remember the inhabitants of the East European Jewish Shtetl and ghettos. The black-and-white photos of everyday scenes are interspersed with interview passages in which Vishniac's own experiences form the background to the presentation of this lost culture.

In the filmed, as it were living photographs, Leiser brings back to life these disappeared worlds and, in the person of the documenting, “photographing philosopher” (Leiser) Vishniac, he interlaces questions concerning home and identity with the notion of remembering.

Further reading:

Roman Vishniac: Verschwundene Welt. Mit einem Vorwort von Elie Wiesel. München: Hanser 1990.

Erwin Leiser: Close up. Auf der Suche nach der Wirklichkeit. Meine Filme 1960-1996. Konstanz: UVK Medien, 1996.