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I'm fucking live-blogging this. Sorry for the language. This is not pretty and I am not sane.
Frank sends us an email, subject :"We went on a trip!"
Body of message: Terezin and Lidice.
So I knew, roughly, that I would be looking at pictures of a seventy-year-old concentration camp and a destroyed village.
The way my webmail works, if you send a 12-megapixel digital photo as an attachment, what the recipient sees when viewing it is a full-sized photo. Does it work that way in other webmail programs? You start out at the upper left-hand corner and you scroll around to see the rest.
Anyway, the first picture started out innocently enough, with a bit of roof and a weathered lead-yellow stucco wall (what I call "railroad yellow" because the various buildings around freight yards used to often be painted that color). There's some concertina wire just visible, so yes, I know what's coming. Scroll down, a worn pavement, the kind of concrete that looks like native stone, with a few weeds. Okay, okay. Scroll a bit to the right, an arch in the wall, a street leading to the distance.
Scroll up. Across the top of the arch, weathered and a bit pitted but not much faded, the words. Those words, that ought to be innocent, ought to be cheerful:
Arbeit Macht Frei
I'm not one of those people who thinks that the murder of jews, gypsies, the disabled and the dissident is the One Crime Against Humanity, the One Evil against which all other evils are measured and found wanting. But oh my dog, I cannot see this without reacting.
The next picture is grainy, probably taken in low light though it appears suffused with light, and it's my own kid, looking like he's feeling the way I do seeing this stuff, standing in front of a strange arched corridor with some kind of niches to the left and low small windows to the right. And then Hana, who looks even more distraught, in front of a memorial statue of many children (the children of Lidice). And then, I don't know, some kind of device, a large cylinder with a locking door. It has wooden laths partially lining the bottom and some hooks in the top. I don't know. Clearly, whatever it is, it is horrible. And then another of my kid standing in front of another weathered wall with concertina wire on it.
Like I said, you can't prepare for it. And I am totally not sane because my mind starts ricocheting, Rwanda and Syria and Guatemala and Peru and Uganda and the California Missions and Wounded Knee, and there's nothing they have in common but mass murder.
edit: Frank says the device is for steaming the lice out of clothes. It was part of the show-ghetto in Terezin where they fooled the Red Cross into thinking there was no death camp.
Frank sends us an email, subject :"We went on a trip!"
Body of message: Terezin and Lidice.
So I knew, roughly, that I would be looking at pictures of a seventy-year-old concentration camp and a destroyed village.
The way my webmail works, if you send a 12-megapixel digital photo as an attachment, what the recipient sees when viewing it is a full-sized photo. Does it work that way in other webmail programs? You start out at the upper left-hand corner and you scroll around to see the rest.
Anyway, the first picture started out innocently enough, with a bit of roof and a weathered lead-yellow stucco wall (what I call "railroad yellow" because the various buildings around freight yards used to often be painted that color). There's some concertina wire just visible, so yes, I know what's coming. Scroll down, a worn pavement, the kind of concrete that looks like native stone, with a few weeds. Okay, okay. Scroll a bit to the right, an arch in the wall, a street leading to the distance.
Scroll up. Across the top of the arch, weathered and a bit pitted but not much faded, the words. Those words, that ought to be innocent, ought to be cheerful:
Arbeit Macht Frei
I'm not one of those people who thinks that the murder of jews, gypsies, the disabled and the dissident is the One Crime Against Humanity, the One Evil against which all other evils are measured and found wanting. But oh my dog, I cannot see this without reacting.
The next picture is grainy, probably taken in low light though it appears suffused with light, and it's my own kid, looking like he's feeling the way I do seeing this stuff, standing in front of a strange arched corridor with some kind of niches to the left and low small windows to the right. And then Hana, who looks even more distraught, in front of a memorial statue of many children (the children of Lidice). And then, I don't know, some kind of device, a large cylinder with a locking door. It has wooden laths partially lining the bottom and some hooks in the top. I don't know. Clearly, whatever it is, it is horrible. And then another of my kid standing in front of another weathered wall with concertina wire on it.
Like I said, you can't prepare for it. And I am totally not sane because my mind starts ricocheting, Rwanda and Syria and Guatemala and Peru and Uganda and the California Missions and Wounded Knee, and there's nothing they have in common but mass murder.
edit: Frank says the device is for steaming the lice out of clothes. It was part of the show-ghetto in Terezin where they fooled the Red Cross into thinking there was no death camp.