Meeting Roman Vishniac

Monique Atlan

« Nobody wanted to help me. I had to do it myself, walking days after days with a heavy backpack as only luggage. I had to do it. My sisters had risked their lives during the Tsar Nicholas time. I had to do what I had to do. It was my turn. In four years, I have been in every shtetls of East Europe and I have taken sixteen thousand pictures between Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, basically in all countries that were not behind “the Iron Curtain”… with the constant obsession to build a monument for the Jew people’s torment… The major requirement to become a human being is to do what others do not want to do. »