'Vishniac': The great story of a great photographer told in documentary

So many great artists lead lives as fascinating as their work and this was clearly the case with the photographer Roman Vishniac, the subject of Laura Bialis’ new documentary, Vishniac, which is being shown at Docaviv, the Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival.

Docaviv, which runs through May 20 at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and other venues around the city, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, with dozens of movies from Israel and all over the world, on nearly every possible subject imaginable. Vishniac, which is being shown in the Arts & Culture section of the festival, will be screened in the presence of its director.

I spoke to Bialis a few days ahead of the opening, about how she came to know Vishniac’s daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, who was able to guide her through her father’s complex life story. Bialis, a distinguished documentary director, who directed such films as Rock in the Red Zone and Refuseniks, made Vishniac with executive producer Nancy Spielberg, producer Roberta Grossman and writer Sophie Sartain.

Vishniac should be seen on the big screen so that audiences can appreciate the brilliance of his photos and following the Docaviv screenings, the movie will be shown at many Jewish film festivals in the US and will also have a theatrical release.

Vishniac is best known for photographs he took of Eastern European Jewish communities in the years just before the Holocaust, from 1934 to 1939, in a project funded by the American Joint Distribution Committee. Many of these photographs were collected in the famous book, A Vanished World.

His photographic talent and his great feeling for his subjects combined to create some of the most unforgettable images of 20th-century photography as he captured a people and a way of life – that was about to be destroyed – in its last vital moments.

“After having looked at so many photographs and also seeing other work by other photographers from that time, even ones that were working in similar places in Eastern Europe before the war, I feel that the magic of Vishniac is that he was able to capture someone and their expression and their emotions. He was able to capture their essence in some unbelievable way,” said Bialis.

Who was Roman Vishniac?

Vishniac, who was born in Moscow to a privileged Jewish family and moved to Berlin following the Russian Revolution, was also fascinated with nature and science. After his family’s narrow escape from Europe in 1940, he reinvented himself in the US photographing life through a microscope and other natural wonders.

In addition, he meticulously documented the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany – posing his daughter in front of Nazi propaganda posters so the police would think he was just taking family photos – and once dropped by Princeton to photograph a bemused Albert Einstein.

He sent photographs to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early 1940s, hoping to inspire him to take action to stop the slaughter of Jews. Following the war, Vishniac photographed survivors, especially children, in displaced persons camps in Europe.

But, as this documentary illustrates through the memories of his daughter, it turns out that, like so many gifted artists, he could be very difficult to live with.

BIALIS MET Kohn in Santa Barbara, where she lived for much of her life, and the two began talking. “I just was sort of blown away by her and her story,” said Bialis. An enduring friendship developed between Bialis and Kohn, although at first Kohn was reluctant to tell the story of her father, because the two had had a fraught relationship.

Kohn felt that she was a disappointment to her father because she was not as gifted in science as her older brother, Wolf. Wolf Vishniac fulfilled his father’s scientific ambitions and became a microbiologist who was fascinated by the search for life on Mars. He died at the age of 51 on a research expedition to the Antarctic.

It took years for Bialis to coax most of the story out of Kohn, who passed away in 2018 in her 90s. “She would say the most amazing things as soon as I would turn off the voice recorder . . . there was always some very important detail that would be told to me when the recorder was off.”

One of the difficult subjects was her parents’ disintegrating marriage. Vishniac and his first wife, Luta, were about to divorce when World War II began. Because of the war, they delayed making the divorce final, thinking that they had a better chance of getting out of Germany if they were an intact family.

They managed to sail out of Germany on one of the last ships carrying those fleeing the Nazis in late 1940. After they arrived in America, the Vishniacs lived unhappily in New York, in what Kohn recalled as a kind of “war zone.” Eventually they divorced and he returned to Germany to reunite with the mistress he had before the war, whom he married and brought back to the US.

His daughter married young and divorced, later marrying Nobel Prize-winning physicist Walter Kohn. She worked with children as a special education teacher. “She never lost that child’s eye view of the world,” said Bialis.

In the film, Kohn says she realized after her father’s death in 1990, “I’m going to be responsible for the photographs [of] people who were murdered and must not be forgotten.” Kohn took on the tremendous responsibility of overseeing her father’s archive.

“I don’t know how many photographs there were altogether, but at one point I had 23,000 images in a hard drive,” Bialis said. Vishniac’s archive was placed in the International Center of Photography and later moved to the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California at Berkeley. His photographs have been exhibited all over the world, and Steven Spielberg and his cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, used them as the model for scenes in Schindler’s List.

In spite of her father’s complex legacy, Kohn appreciated what she learned from him. Toward the end of the film, she says, “My father gave me a lifelong gift. If I’m walking in the woods somewhere or on the beach, I’m very aware of all the life that’s going on around me. He used to say, ‘The closer you come, the more beautiful it is.’”