As a young man he twice escaped firing squads before fleeing to Berlin where he

As a young man, he twice escaped firing squads, before fleeing to Berlin, where he lived until Hitler came to power.Until 1880 most of the Jews in Europe had lived in closed communities and needed a police pass to travel. Unsold prints will be returned to the Vishniac estate after the London show.Marcus Bury, who runs the gallery with his wife, Sascha Hackel, said: “These are very emotional pictures and not really the sort of thing many people would like to buy and take home with them It is haunting and poignant work The images… make you realise the profound sense of change taking place in so many people’s lives: the deprivation, degradation and the cruelty that they experienced even before the war officially started.”Vishniac was born into a privileged Russian Jewish family in 1897. His later concern about the plight of Eastern European Jews came from his first hand experience of the resurgence of anti-semitism in his own country, when many Jews were exiled to Siberia. He had no means, no hope, no aim.”Modern prints of Vishniac’s work were shown in London and New York 15 years ago in a celebrated exhibition, “A Vanished World”, but the original photographs on show at the HackelBury were not included. The vintage collection has been at the Institute of Contemporary Photography in New York since 1983. After taking the picture, I walked up to him and heard his story He had lost his job, his room.

The bundle under his arm is all that is left of home, furniture and belongings All earthly goods wrapped in a piece of paper The homeless man eyed me suspiciously As always, my camera was hidden. His subjects’ eyes reveal their weariness and unease; he harshness of their lives is all too evident.While the 30 prints that make up the exhibition at the HackelBury gallery tell their own story, Vishniac also made a series of notes on the back of his prints.Of a homeless man carrying a package and standing on a street corner in Poland, he wrote: “Wife and children left to earn something by begging. Vishniac hid his camera in his clothes and took photographs through the buttonhole of his coat. He sewed the negatives into the lining.The power of his images lies in the way that, despite the constraints of his working conditions, he was able to convey the struggle of a people to exist in what were virtually siege conditions. Only 2,000 of the 16,000 harrowing photographs he took between 1933 and 1939 to record his doomed race survived the war.

Much of his work was destroyed by the Nazis.Vishniac travelled 5,000 miles between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains photographing children, adults, traders and street scenes in the Jewish quarters and ghettos.It was dangerous work. He risked arrest if discovered, and the Jews were nervous of being photographed, as well as disapproving on religious grounds. His pictures are one of the few remaining documentary records of these estranged and poverty-stricken communities that were virtually wiped out during the Second World War.The photographs on display in a London gallery are the first prints Vishniac made from his negatives. It is an uncompromising image of the desperation of life in the Jewish ghetto of Cracow in 1938. It is given added poignancy by the fact that the street name has been erased in an attempt to protect the community from identification.
The picture is one of a collection of secretly taken images by photojournalist Roman Vishniac, on show for the first time in Britain.Vishniac spent six years recording the lives of persecuted Eastern European Jews on film during the 1930s. Then, it might be said, no one expects Blue Peter presenters to be drug users.. A BEARDED man hunches his shoulders and clutches his overcoat to his chest to keep off the driving snow that has already blackened beneath his worn boots.

He follows a woman carrying a covered tray, her bent head and shoulders swathed in scarves, as she struggles past a crumbling building. One third of university students have tried it.”Oswin Baker, of the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependency, says: “The thrust of drug research through the Nineties has been to try to dispel the stereotypical view of drug users.” There is no stronger stereotype than the bloated-ego media type with a rolled-up note in a nostril. Now it is between pounds 40 and pounds 60 without loss in quality.” The Home Office says cocaine seizures increased from 940kg in 1995 to 2,074kg in 1997.Dr Winstock says: “In a study of 200 clubbers from all walks of life, 70 per cent had taken cocaine. Undoubtedly most older newspaper executives believe what they are printing. But there must be reporters who wrote about “evil” drugs while having the drugs in their system at the time.

One tabloid reporter who uses cocaine says: “In any drug story there is always another element – like being a children’s TV presenter – that makes it a story. The reporter’s drug use is irrelevant.”The danger of focusing on the cocaine habits of people in the metropolitan media is that it ignores the drug’s popularity across the country and across different social groups.Farmers and builders in rural areas take cocaine and it is no longer expensive. Greg Poulter, of the drug charity Release, says: “Eighteen months ago, a gram would cost you pounds 60 to pounds 80. Those professions also require lots of social interaction – often involving alcohol and late nights. Cocaine allows you to drink more without becoming intoxicated and can make you appear confident Of course it also makes you restless, agitated and paranoid. On the come-down it causes sleeplessness, anxiety and depression.”In the Eighties, the American music and radio industries were greased by cocaine.