Photo Albums

The pictures hit him like a cheap whiskey burn, straight to the gut, no chaser.

One showed a Jewish boy, maybe ten, drowning in those striped rags, the yellow star sewn on like a target for every drunk with a rifle. Another was nothing but bones twisted wrong and black smoke crawling out of chimneys into a sky that didn’t give a damn.

He sat there in the half-dark living room, cigarette dangling, trying to shove the images away with anything—wild horses tearing loose across some nowhere plain, iron hooves slamming red dirt, the thick green stink of South African bush at night swallowing everything whole. Anything but those albums his grandfather had dragged home after the camps were opened, pages stiff with other people’s endings.

But the pictures stayed, quiet and patient, teaching him the only kind of respectability that matters: the kind you feel when you realize the world can turn you into smoke and nobody will even look up from their beer.

war correspondent,
battle of El Alamein,
and then Treblinka.