Some Memories Never Leave You

Kesher Talk tipped me off to this incredible story:

"ZYWIEC, Poland (AP) -- For years afterward, photographer Wilhelm Brasse saw them in his dreams -- emaciated Jewish girls, herded naked in front of his camera at Auschwitz.

Eventually, his dreams stopped. But he never took pictures again.

"I didn't return to my profession, because those Jewish kids, and the naked Jewish girls, constantly flashed before my eyes," he said.

"Even more so because I knew that later, after taking their pictures, they would just go to the gas."

Even today, more than 60 years after it ended, there are still stories to be told about the Holocaust, and the grisly work of running a concentration camp. Brasse recently told his story on Polish television. Now he is talking to The Associated Press over coffee and pork cutlets at a friend's restaurant in Zywiec, his hometown in southern Poland. He is cheerful, friendly and sharp-witted at 89.

But his voice occasionally wavers as he remembers."

Click here to read the rest of the story.

3 comments:

Post-Denom Jew said...

Yes, I have clients whose memories are like waves beating against their sanity. They will not be nazi-free until they die.

cruisin-mom said...

and pretty soon there will be no one left to tell those stories.

Jack Steiner said...

SK,

I cannot even imagine, but somehow I am not surprised.

CM,

Scary, isn't it.

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