Photo Albums

the pictures went in like a splinter you can’t dig out.

one showed a Jewish boy, maybe ten, lost inside those striped rags, the yellow star sewn on like a tag on something being shipped. 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 like wild horses tearing loose across some nowhere plain, iron hooves slamming red dirt, the thick green stink of the South African bush at night swallowing everything whole. anything but those albums his grandfather had dragged home after the camps, pages stiff with other people’s endings.

but the pictures stayed, quiet and patient, teaching him the only humility that matters: the kind you feel when you realise 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.