Feet and Faces

This evening the better half and I received a photo album belonging to her maternal grandfather. Among pictures of his youth and of his children's youth, there were pictures from his tour during WWII. There were pictures of the liberation of Buchenwald.

There is one photo that is haunting me. It is of a stack of skeleton-like bodies. We've all seen them; there are many in the history of the holocaust. Some bodies are facing the camera, others show only their feet.

What frightens me is that I see the humanity, I wonder about the life of, the people of whom I can only see the feet. In the state of starvation at death, the toes of these people were more real and more human than their faces. Their faces are all the same, all blank, all devoid of reality. But the feet - the toes, all different, the feet of all shapes and sizes - I can picture these feet when they were a year old and they sucked on their toes and when they were five and wore their fathers' shoes and when they were twelve and scrunched their toes up in the sand of a beach with their family...

If I were a poet I would write something that captures the wrong, upside-down-ness of the feet and the faces of these people. But I am not. I cannot adequately express this feeling. I can only sit with it. And try to tell you about it.