The Jews, it was once suggested by Mark Twain, represent, by their numbers, no more than “…… a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way.”

It was part of a commentary published in Harpers Magazine in 1899 in which Twain inquired as to the secret of the Jews immortality.

Some thirty five years later the furor of Nationalism in Eastern Europe gave way to the venom and savagery of Nazism.

Living in Berlin during that time was Roman Vishniac, a young Russian physician with a passion for photography. With an almost prophetic vision he wandered the ghettos of Eastern Europe often at great danger to himself. Vishniac sensed he was capturing more than just the depredation of a people, as he wrote later in his book ‘A Vanished World’ "… it was my duty to my ancestors, who grew up among the very people who were being threatened, to preserve - in pictures, at least - a world that might soon cease to exist.”

Was Vishniac right? Had the world of the Jew vanished some 45 years after Twain posed the question of their immortality?