Reminds me of a great book, the Long Walk by Slavomar Rawicz
Cool, looks like it will fit nicely with Amos Chapple's photo piece. I just ordered it for reading this winter.
Sometimes I wish I wasn't, but I'm drawn to stories about the gulags, concentration, and internment camps.
I grew up in Germany. One of the places we lived was in Dachau in the 50's, so not awful long after WWII. We lived in a huge, high-ceilinged duplex that the Nazis had used for living quarters during the war. There were exercise rings in the ceiling of the dining room, which the soldiers had used as their workout room.
It was quite an odd, and powerful, environment to experience as a kid, living so close to where over 30,000 people had died and where over 30,000 people were still imprisoned at the end of the war. The US Army hired a number of the former prisoners and kept them on for years. One was the groundskeeper where we lived. I remember him as tall, gaunt, and almost regal in his quiet way. He always wore a boiled wool vest and a driver's cap.
He would gather us kids sometimes and chaperone us on hikes through the woods around our homes. We thought of it as the Black Forest, deep and dark, and made up stories about all kinds of things. On one walk, he took us back through the woods to a clearing with a recently abandoned rail building, an old train station. He stood at the edge of the clearing, silent and watching as we ran about the platform and building. It's one of the clearest memories I have from four years in Germany.
I didn't realize until I was much older and back in the States that it must've been a place where thousands of people were off-loaded from rail cars and marched to the camp and that he must've been awash in memories.
Every time I see a piece like the one
@Optimistic Paranoid linked, I flash back to those times as a kid in Europe.
Memories are powerful things.
