This photo was taken in Trnava, Czechoslovakia, in 1937. It is part of an exhibition in Paris dedicated to Roman Vishniac (1897-1990). The 70 photos of the exhibit, all in black & white, were taken between 1936 and 1939, and are about Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.
Roman Vishniac was a photographer and a biologist born in Russia in 1897. After the communist October Revolution, his family fled from the anti-Semitism spurred by the Third Russian Revolution and moved to Berlin in 1920. When Hitler took over in 1933, Roman Vishniac was aware of the growing threat to the Jews. Commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution, he travelled through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, taking pictures at great risk to his life with a hidden camera. Nevertheless he took over 16,000 photos; all but 2,000 of these negatives were confiscated and destroyed after he was arrested many times during his tour of Europe.
His photos were published in 1947 (The Vanished World) in the US, where he has lived since 1940.
This is probably a striking exhibition: he knew he could not save his people, but he could try to save their memory. But he did not just want to preserve the memories of the Jews; he actively fought to increase awareness in the West of the worsening situation in Eastern Europe. Through his photographs, he sought to alert the rest of the world to the horrors of the Nazi persecution.
However, I won’t go to this exhibition…I no longer live in Paris this year.

Roman Vishniac, Un monde disparu.
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, 71 rue du Temple, Paris-3è
Métros : Rambuteau, Hôtel de Ville
Until February, 18th