The Nazis' rise to power and the accompanying anti-Semitism prompted Roman Vishniac to document the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe on the eve of the Holocaust. The surviving 2,000 candid images provide evidence of people, places, and traditions that were forcibly erased. Vishniac managed to get out of a French concentration camp and make his way to America in 1941, where he continued his scientific work with his photomicrography and time-lapse cinemamicrography of small animals, insects, and plants.