A Deeper Meaning Of Books

[madwriter]

I recently discovered the book A Vanished World--a collection of photographs of Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe on the cusp of World War II taken by Roman Vishniac, a Russian-American photographer with Jewish roots. Vishniac risked his life and freedom numerous times to snap these pictures with a hidden camera and smuggle them out to people who

Comments

[lisapt]

I once asked my grandmother what everyone thought of the news reels they showed in the theaters during that time. Seeing them now, in retrospect, it seems obvious what horrors where happening and what was on the horizon.

She said no one really believed them. They thought it was staged propaganda to get the US into a war. I find that sad on many levels, and interesting that even back then people never really trusted the news sources.

[madwriter]

Members of my own grandparents' generation told me that they fell into the same trap as a lot of other people: They knew that nearly all the anti-German propaganda from WWI was hoaxed, so they assumed the same thing in the late 1930s about the anti-Jewish news coming out.

My Uncle Rodney took pictures at Dachau when he helped liberate it, and I wonder now in retrospect if one reason he did was so that people would actually believe him when he described what he'd seen there.

[sartorias]

Oh, boy so very painful.

[mabfan]

Wow. Sad.

I need to track down that book.

[gnomi]

I remember learning about Roman Vishniac in high school. He was an amazing person to make the attempt to get the pictures out.