Jewish farmers in the Carpathian mountains
Creator(s)
- Roman Vishniac (Director)
- Roman Vishniac (Camera Operator)
- National Center for Jewish Film
Biographical History
Born in Russia in 1897, Roman Vishniac was a biologist by training, having earned a doctorate in zoology and a medical degree from Moscow universities and a doctorate in Oriental art from the University of Berlin. For many years he was prevented from working in any of those fields because of war, revolution and political persecution. He instead pursued a career in microphotography, the photographing of insects, cells, plankton and other small organisms. His images in this area regularly appeared in Life magazine. From 1935 to 1938, Vishniac explored on foot the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, recording life in the Jewish shtetlekh (villages) of Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania, communities that even then seemed threatened by routine change as much as by violence and extermination. Using a hidden camera and working under difficult circumstances that included evading the police and also Nazis, he was able to take thousands of photographs. Before he finished the tour, he had been jailed eleven times and placed in a concentration camp in Vichy France. Roman Vishniac died in 1990.
Scope and Content
Scenes of Jewish farmers, carpenters, lumbering in the remote Carpathian village of Vysni Apsa. INT of cheder. CUs of people. Basket making. Various pople pose/work in fields. CUs of orthodox men. Interiors of girls in school. Exteriors of houses. Crossing river. Cattle. Scenes are scattered. Chaim Simcha Mechlowitz, an Orthodox Jewish farmer, tanner, and father of eleven children appears from 12:33:50 to 12:34:11 and 12:35:54 to 12:36:00. He was killed at Auschwitz in 1944. In 1938, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) commissioned Roman Vishniac to make three films of the remote Carpathian Jewish villages and Galician towns he had been documenting for the relief organization in still photographs since 1935. The films were lost during the upheavals of the war. These outtakes document the rural and observant Jewish farming communities that had been isolated for hundreds of years. Vishniac noted in his seminal publication, "A Vanished World" that: "In 1648 a group of Jews crossed the Carpathian Mountains seeking refuge from the massacres and tortures of Bohdan Khmeltinsky. In this bleak, desolate part of the world, they founded the village of Upper Apsa, which was unknown to the outside world. Here farmers still grew the same type of corn Columbus had brought from the New World. It took great exertions and heavy pressure for their plows to furrow the earth." "The peasants were all so uneducated that you could not speak with them about anything. Their interest was just vodka; only alcohol to drink. But a Jewish peasant - he was a wise man who knew about life, without having a radio or newspaper or any information, nothing but his own thought and understanding. And this made him most interesting for all discussions. He asked me if a danger existed and if Hitler's police would come, arrest him, and send him to death. I feared this, too, but could not advise him. There was no place to go. The whole world was closed and nobody was interested in saving the Jews."
Note(s)
An identical 16mm print is available at the University of South Carolina's Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) - http://mirc.sc.edu/fedora/repository/usc%3A2799. See Story 753, Film ID 504 and Story 2526, Film ID 2302 for duplicate footage. See USHMM Photo Archives W/S# 22054 and 22050 for family photographs of Chaim Mechlowitz.
Subjects
- FARMERS/FARMING
- CHILDREN (JEWISH)
- JEWS
- MOUNTAINS
- SCHOOLS
- RIVERS
- ORTHODOX JEWS
- JEWISH LIFE (PRE-WAR)
- HOUSES
- COWS
- VISHNIAC, ROMAN
- CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Places
- , Czechoslovakia
Genre
- Unedited.
- Film