Addison Beecher Colvin Whipple, writer and censorship fighter, died on March 17, aged 94.
“Words are never enough,” wrote Life
magazine in an editorial when it finally got the approval to reproduce
the pictures of dead American soldiers in September 1943 (more).
That permission, which came all the way from the president, would have
been all but impossible if not for the tenacious efforts of Cal Whipple,
Life’s Washington correspondent.
Rules then prohibited the publication of
photos of the American dead, lest they damage morale on the home front.
In his own words, Mr. Whipple, “went from army captain to major to
colonel to general until [he] wound up in the office of an Assistant
Secretary of the Air Corps.” to argue that these photos were what the
home front needed. The Secretary decided to forward the photos to the
White House, where President Roosevelt agreed that the American public
has grown complacent about the war and its horrific toll, and cleared
their publication.
As the consequence, war bond sales
boomed, and although the censorship rule regarding the home front morale
was abolished, the censorship itself would prove to be enduring.
Censorship and self-censorship continued with the pictures from Dresden, Hiroshima,
and even Auschwitz. The rule not to show faces of the American dead
existed until the Korean War, which saw bans on photos showing the
aftermaths by US bombings in North Korea, and of political prisoners.
It all changed in Vietnam, which would
come to be known as the “first war to take place in America’s living
rooms.” It was a conflict whose course unfolded in iconic photos, from
the beginning to the end.
After Vietnam, the military would never again allow journalists to have
free rein in covering a war. The golden age of war photography, which
nurtured such figures as Larry Burrows or Francoise Demulder,
ended as abruptly as it began. In modern wars, not just in Iraq and
Afghanistan but also in smaller conflicts in Grenada and Panama,
reporters would be corralled into press pools or embeds and frequently
threatened with revocation of credentials if they strayed from guidelines.
With various newspapers looking back on
Iraq War on this 10th Anniversary of its beginning with grand pictorial
sideshows, it is sometimes very easy to forget what we see is more often
than not authorized, sanitized, bowdlerized.But it is also comforting
to remember that for images hidden away from us, there is always someone like Cal Whipple fighting for their inclusion into the recorded memory.
The End of the Thousand-Year Reich
As the Second World War came to a close, a
wave of suicides swept Berlin and other parts of Germany. Hitler was a
lifelong admirer of Wagner and his climatic opera, Götterdämmerung
(“Twilight of the Gods”) where the heroine Brünnhilde returns the
stolen cursed ring to the River Rhine and hurls herself onto her dead
lover Siegfried’s funeral pyre. This immolation unleashes a fiery
conflagration that topples the stronghold of the gods,
Valhalla. According to a dispatch from a Japanese diplomat in Berlin,
Hitler initially planned “to embark alone in a plane carrying bombs and
blow himself up in the air somewhere over the Baltic” if the Allies
enter Berlin. His motive was to suggest to his supporters ”that he had
become a god and was dwelling in heaven” — a Brünnhildean
self-sacrifice, in a Messerschmitt.
In the end, his suicide was less
grandiose and ignominious — although it didn’t stop some of his fervent
followers from believing that Hitler had escaped unharmed from the
wreckage of his 1000-year Reich. But Hitler was not the only Nazi to
follow Brünnhilde’s example. Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler all committed
suicide, as did Justice Minister Otto-Georg Thierack and Culture
Minister Bernhard Rust. Eight out of 41 regional party leaders, seven
out of 47 senior SS and police chiefs, fifty-three out of 553 army
generals, fourteen out of 98 Luftwaffe generals and eleven out of 53
admirals killed themselves. Housing Commissar Robert Ley strangled
himself awaiting trial at Nuremberg. Goering would follow him when the
Nuremberg judges denied him the firing squad he requested.
This suicidal impulse was not confined to
the Nazi elite. Ordinary Germans in untold numbers responded to the
prospect of defeat in the same way. At the Berlin Philharmonic’s last
performance, which coincidentally but not too surprisingly was Götterdämmerung, the
audience was given potassium cyanide pills. In April 1945 there were
3,881 recorded suicides in Berlin, nearly twenty times the figure for
March. Untold numbers of victims of rape by the Soviet Red Army
also committed suicide, and news of violence and rape further
propelled mass suicides in villages all over Germany. Although the
motives was widely explained as the “fear of the Russian invasion”, the
suicides also happened in the areas liberated by the British and
American troops.
Mass suicides that created a sensation
were those of Leipzig burgomaster’s family, that was captured
by Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller. The photos showed a different
approach between this two great female war-photographers. Bourke-White, a
meticulous observer as always, kept her distance from the tragedy, even
taking photos from the gallery above. Miller moved in closer; a fashion
photographer covering the war for Vogue, Miller’s photo of the body of
burgomaster’s daughter was almost a fashion shoot of a wax mannequin —
her Nazi armband immaculately displayed, her lips parted as if waiting
for a true love’s kiss that would revive her.
Bourke-White's pictures are on the left, and Miller's on the right.
Grief
The Second World War claimed the lives of
at least forty-one million Europeans, more than half of them in the
Soviet Union. Between 8-9 million soldiers in the Red Army were killed,
and 18 million more were wounded. Between 16-19 million Soviet citizens
lost their lives. Estimates of the total Soviet casualties are around
25 million, five times that of the Germans, and even this rough number
was deduced only by reducing the total population figures at the next
census.
Although the Soviet hagiographies
conveniently ignored it, there was more than a whiff of self-destruction
in these numbers. Employing an insulating jargon that removed them from
realities and incomprehensibilities of war, Soviet commanders asked
‘How many matches were burned?’ or ‘How many pencils were broken?’ when
they wanted to know about their losses after a battle. For all his
charisma, political awareness, and good sense of military strategy,
Stalin remained, in the words of the acclaimed Soviet historian Dmitri
Volkogonov, “an armchair general”, who had ‘fathomed the secrets of war
at the cost of bloody experimentation.” His planning was erratic, and
his measures ‘to combat cowardice’ were extreme. According to one
especially infamous order, Number 227, every army was to organize units
which would move along as a second front behind the first wave of
attack, and shoot down any soldier who hesitated or retreated.
The huge toll in human lives paid for
Stalin’s ‘brilliant strategy’ was captured in Dmitri Baltermants’ photo,
‘Grief, or Searching for the Loved Ones in Kerch’. Before ultimately
reaching Berlin like the Red Army itself, Baltermants covered the
battles of Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. Grief was taken at the
Crimean front, where he went upon his release from the hospital after
seriously wounding himself in Stalingrad.
The photo depicts a 1942 Nazi massacre in
the Crimean village of Kerch. Village women searched for the bodies of
their loved ones. The contrast between the oversaturated sky above and
the bodies haphazardly strewn in the foreground underlines the poignancy
of the moment, but for the same reason, the photo was censored in the
Soviet Union where authorities only published the photos that could help
boost morale; ‘Grief’ reflected nothing but harsh tragedies of war, and
it wasn’t seen by the general public until the 1960s.
The photo was allegedly cropped, and
oversaturated sky itself was either the result of studio error or
deliberate manipulation by Baltermants. Like so many tales originating
from behind the Iron Curtain, these stories were of course unverified.
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya
Travelogues tend to be disappoint.
Instead of travelogues that tell gripping stories about both people and
history of a particular locale, travel writing these days obsesses
itself with how to travel cheaper and faster, and with some
architectural minutiae that fail to interest anybody but third year arts
students. I was in Moscow to meet some Russian government officials
earlier this summer and they put me at a huge hotel complex outside the
city at Partizanskaya. I have been there several times before —
Partizanskya being the site of a massive souvenir market — armed with
varying guidebooks, but what they failed to tell me was that the
distinctive looking statue at Partizanskya Metro Station was that of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, once one of the most revered martyrs of the Russian State.
I first met Zoya several years ago in David Plante’s novel The Age of Terror.
The picture above of Zoya’s corpse spurs the novel’s young American
hero to travel to the then slowly collapsing Soviet Union in search of
identity. When I read it the book, I thought the photo was made-up. It
was not, but scholars still debate how much of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya
story is. For some, it bored all the fingerprints of the hagiographers
of the godless Soviet Union who were all too happy to create martyrs.
The official Soviet story went something
like this: When the Nazis invade Russia, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya quit the
tenth grade at Moscow. Hair-cropped, and in men’s clothes, the 18-year
old joined the Resistance and became one of its most celebrated heros.
The Germans finally captured her in November 1941, and subjected her to
various tortures — which included belts, punches, lighters, saws and
bayonets. She refused to talk and the Germans led her to the gallows
with a card inscribed “Guerrilla” about her neck.
There, at the village square of
Petrisheva, Zoya gave her courageous speech: “You hang me now but I am
not alone. There are 200 million of us. You won’t hang everybody. I
shall be avenged. Soldiers! Surrender before it is too late. Victory
will be ours.” She was hanged, and the Germans left the body hanging on
the gallows for several weeks. Eventually she was buried just before the
Soviet liberation of Petrisheva in January 1942. The above photo of her
body were later found on the body of a dead German officer at Smolensk
along with three other photos of the execution process.
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became popular with a Pravda
article was written by Pyotr Lidov, who had heard about the execution
from an elderly peasant. Yet many doubted this official version; they
noted that ‘Kosmo’ and ‘Demyan’ were both proper first names, which had
been combined to make an all-inclusive family name with the feminine
ending kaya (much like Jane Q. Smith). Others said the Soviet
authorities were pulling America’s leg with a ridiculous sounding last
name that sounded almost like ‘Damn Yankee’. Later, there were
acrimonious debates on whether it was just local peasants who hanged
Zoya after she destroyed their property. Some questioned whether Zoya
myth was created to draw attention away from the other heroine of the
Resistance who happened to be a Jewess.
No matter what, Stalin immediately named her a Hero of the Soviet
Union. Many young soviet soliders carried a photo of her, and the words
‘For Zoya’ were also written on Soviet tanks and planes heading to
Berlin. Streets, kolkhozes, Pioneer organizations, a mountain and a
minor planet were all named after Zoya. The ultimate accolade came when
she was reburied at the Novodevichy Cemetery. There she rests now,
surrounded by many Russian luminaries, whose works she allegedly enjoyed
in life.
(One source I find online says a Pravda
photographer named Sergej Strunniknow took the above photo. I find this a
little hard to believe but there it is).
Nagasaki, August 9th 1945
Interestingly enough, when Hiroshima was
atom-bombed, the Tokyo government radio told the people that a “new type
of bomb” had been used. The real horrors in Hiroshima were unknown to
the wider populace; since the city was utterly destroyed and
communications were hard, even the imperial government was not totally
of what happened there. Two days would pass before the government met to
discuss the new developments. In the wider world, the situation was
quickly changing too; the Soviet Union’s declaration on war on Japan
threw a wrench into both American and Japanese strategies.
On the American side, the decisions to
use two nuclear bombs — to show than American has more than enough
supply of such weapons — had been agreed upon since April 1945. Only
the potential targets were
debated upon, so that the U.S. could ban conventional attacks on those
cities — in part so it would be easier to measure the destruction from
the atomic bomb. The top choice was the emperor’s place in Kyoto, but
the decision was vetoed by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who spent his honeymoon there and enjoyed the city.
(Another thing Stimson considered was that if the emperor were to
perish, it would have hardened the Japanese resolve and precluded a
surrender.) Top targets became Hiroshima and Kokura. However, August
9th 1945 was a particularly cloudy day in Kokura. The bombing carrying
the bomb gave up on Kokura and went on to its secondary target,
Nagasaki.
The Japanese Supreme Council received the
news that Nagasaki had been destroyed while they were just debating the
terms of surrender. Now, surrender was not only inevitable, but also
the only route for survival. On August 15th,the Emperor’s surrender
speech was broadcast over the radio — this was the first time an Emperor
of Japan had deigned to speak through a radio.
On the day after the Nagaski Bombing,a
military photographer Yosuke Yamahata took over a hundred photographs
of the devastated city. His photographs, taken in an interval of twelve
hours in the afternoon of August 10th, were the most extensive record
of the atomic bombings. In between Japan’s surrender and arrival of the
American Occupation Forces, these photos were widely circulated; for
instance, the 21 August issue of Mainichi Shinbun printed them. The
Western audience would, however, have to wait further seven years before
the censorship was lifted and they appeared in the 29 September 1952 issue of Life, together with Yoshito Matsushige’s photos of Hiroshima. The same year they also appeared in the book form.
Fall of France
Some say it was taken in Toulon as the
French soldiers leave for Africa. Some say it was taken as Nazi tanks
rolled into Paris. Others claim it was taken in Marseilles as historic
French battle flags were taken aboard ships for protection against the
conquering Nazis. No matter what incident prompted him to cry, the
French civilian cries across decades from his faded photograph. He cries
not only for his generation, but also for his century. The photo, one
of the most heart-rending pictures of the Second World War, was possibly
taken by George Mejat for Fox Movietone News/AP.
The fall of France, only six weeks after
initial Nazi assault, came as a shock and surprise to many. Contrary to
popular beliefs, the Maginot Line wasn’t exactly circumvented by the
Nazis through Belgium. The Nazis, in fact, broke through the strongest
point of the Maginot Line, Fort Eben-Emael, which connected the French
and Belgian fortification systems. The fortifications were unequipped to
defend against gliders, explosives and blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe simply
flew over it. When the Allied forces reinvaded in June 1944, the
Maginot Line, now held by German defenders, was again largely bypassed, a
clear indicator that this line, designed with a WWI-like trench warfare
in mind, was never actually going to work no matter where the Nazis
attacked.
The fall of France was the first crisis
for the new coalition government of Winston Churchill in London. For
next 20 months, the Great Britain and her Empire would stand alone
against the Nazi armies. Not until D-Day, 6 June 1944, would an Allied
army return to Western Europe. Greatly emboldened by their success, the
Germans would gamble even more heavily on their next major operation –
the invasion of Russia. This time they would be less lucky.
This was published in LIFE on March 7, 1949, and didn't name the Frenchman in question
Jack Sharpe
Jack Sharpe was sent to Singapore just a
few days before the Japanese invasion there, and captured by the
Japanese. He was sent to Thailand to work on the notorious Burma Railway
and was nearly executed over an attempted escape. Before his court
martial for escape, Sharpe defiantly proclaimed that he would live to
see all of Japan surrender and that he would walk out of the prison on
his own two feet.
Sharpe was sent back to the Outram jail
in Singapore; almost no one survived it for two years, and it was from
this infamous prison that Sharpe was liberated in August 1945 with the
dubious distinction of being its longest survivor. True to his words, he
walked out of the gates on his own two feet, and collapsed immediately
afterwards. During his captivity, plagued by scurvy, dysentery and
scabs, Sharpe saw his weight decreased from 70 kilograms to less than 25
kilograms. In September 1945, the world was stunned by the publication
of Sharpe’s skeletal figure cheerfully smiling from the end of his bed.
The photo told the story of appalling Japanese treatment of their
prisoners, and also the indomitable spirit of Jack Sharpe, who
eventually lived to be 88.
One in three POWs under the Japanese
during the war perished — seven times that of POWs under the Germans and
Italians. In fact, around 90,000 Asian labourers and 16,000 Allied POWs
died on the Burma Railroad alone. The Japanese, coming from a shame
culture which would rather commit suicide, never understood the concept
of surrendering, and treated their prisoners with the greatest of
contempt.
The Rape of Lvov
Photos can speak a thousand words but
sometimes it is unclear what they said. Take the above photo for
instance. In 1993, Time magazine published it with the
caption, “Jewish girl raped by Ukrainians in Lvov, Poland, in 1945.” An
angry outcry by the Ukrainian community followed, and Time magazine had
to issue a retraction and an apology. The fact was that the photo was
one of the pictures with a murkier history to come out of the Second
World War.
The photo was not taken in 1945 but in
1941 in Lvov (its Russian name), or Lviv (its name today), Ukraine,
shortly after the Germans captured the city from the Soviets on June
30. The photo is one of a series showing women being stripped, harassed
and chased by civilians as chaos led to rapes, pogroms and killings.
Some scholars claimed that the women in the photo were Jewish victims of
the pogroms in Lvov. The Germans spread rumors that Jews were
responsible for the murders of several thousand political prisoners
found in the cellars of Soviet NKVD buildings, thus fueling the
hatred and the acts of revenge against local Jews that followed.
Other historians insist that the majority
of the women pictured in the series of photographs were mistresses the
Soviets abandoned when they fled Lvov to escape the German troops. The
defenseless collaborators were then attacked by resentful residents for
consorting with the Soviet enemy. Some suggests the Nazis orchestrated
the entire scene to shoot a propaganda film. Some said the women were
not raped, but merely public denounced. Over the years, the perpetrators
of the atrocities depicted on the photo included the Soviets, the
Ukrainians, the SS and local anti-Semites. Yet, even the Jewishness of
the women depicted was called into question, and alas, we will never
know.
However, the photo remains prominently in
many history textbooks, their respective writers’ narratives and
assumptions often belying the true mystery behind it. Time-Life: History of the Second World War
(1989) captioned it, “A rape victim in the city of Lvov cries out in
rage and anguish as an older woman comforts her. Anti-Semitic
citizens rounded up 1,000 Jews andover to the Germans. Life: World War II (1990) also used it, in the chapter titled “1941 Rape of Russia.
The Elderly Butcher Boy of Fascism
Even today, Italy has one of the least
free presses in Western world. Although press-censorships were not
created with the Fascist state Benito Mussolini forged, Mussolini’s
Ministry of Popular Culture — which administrates everything that
appeared in newspapers, radio, printed works, theatre, cinema or any
form of art — did cast a long shadow. In a move worthy of today’s
language bastions, it banned usage of non-Italian words; the ministry’s
lackeys were posted to publishing houses to immediately oversee what is
being printed, and there were public bonfires of forbidden books.
However, noting Italian efficiency, all actions were more Kafkaesque
than Orwellian.
In a hierarchical system where the
government appointed directors and editors and distributed printing
paper, self-censorship was easily accomplished by individuals currying
favor with the regime. Although many international publications, writers
and photographers were left untouched by censors before the war, the
beginning of the WWII changed the landscape.
Working for Time and Life magazines, Carl
Mydans arrived in Rome in May 1940. Tensions were high; Mussolini was
thought to be on the brink of declaring war on the Allies (although in
reality he delayed another month). At the public events, Mydans was
repeatedly prevented from taking pictures by Blackshirts who blocked his
cameras. He remembers the events that happened next: “On May 9,
Mussolini appeared at the Victor Emmanuel II monument to celebrate the
fourth anniversary of the founding of the Italian Empire. A circle of
security men barred me from the ceremony. But as Mussolini was
departing, he strutted right past me. The security men were compelled to
applaud as he went by, and I was able to make one quick frame between
their shoulders. The picture appeared across a page of LIFE several
weeks later with the caption, “The Elderly Butcher Boy of Fascism”. The
photo, which appeared in LIFE on June 24th, caused the responsible
staffers of TIME and LIFE being immediately expelled from Italy. Rather
than sending a new bureau staff, they closed down the Rome Bureau,
writing “In the face of wartime censorship there was no chance in Italy
for TIME’s kind of reporting.”
Churchill and Tommy Gun
The above photograph of Winston Churchill
with the Thompson submachine gun was taken during his visit to the
coastal defense positions near Hartlepool on 31 July, 1940. The
prospects were not looking good for the United Kingdom and her new prime
minister. Governments in exile were arriving to London while Home Guard
was just being established and ill-prepared; For a month, Hitler had
been preparing to invade Britain, and the Luftwaffe had been commencing
what would eventually be known as the Battle of Britain. Britain had
lost the Channel Islands barely a month before, while it looked as if
Russia would join the war from the German side.
The Churchill photograph was timely. It
was used to convey Churchill as a war leader. Both sides of the war
tried to use this picture for propaganda purposes. The British photoshopped out*
two soldiers standing next to Churchill, making him look statesmanlike,
determined and menacing. On the other hand, the Germans got hold of the
photo, and compared it to those of the gangsters of the American West.
The Nazis used this photo in their propaganda leaflets airdropped onto
Britain during the Battle of Britain (below).
It was ironic that the British tried to
render their prime minister more threatening. Churchill had more
military experience than any British Prime Minister since the Duke of
Wellington. Although he had been the Prime Minister for only 50 days
when this photo was taken, he had been a military man throughout his
life. He was a member of the Harrow Rifle Corps while in public school.
After failing the entrance exam twice, he was admitted to Sandhurst, and
graduated eighth in his class (and leading in tactics and
fortifications). He saw action in India and South Africa and served as
the minister in all three branches of the military before eventually
being selected for the premiership.
* Used in a loose retroactive sense. :)
Pictures We Would Like To Publish
A newspaper that tells only part of the
truth is a million times preferable to one that tells the truth to harm
its country, once wrote The Sun. The Picture Post would have disagreed. ”Responsibly Awkward” had been the motto of the Post, Britain’s answer to Life
magazine, throughout the Second World War. With the nation engulfed in
the greatest conflagration it had ever seen, humour was in low supply
but the Post steadfastly provided it with pictures of dozing
soldiers, sleeping people in underground shelters, and amusing street
graffitti. When the Germans were preparing to invade Britain in the
darkest days of the war, the paper calmly produced an 8-page feature
titled, “How to Invade Britain”, an account of Napoleon’s grandiose but
scuttled plans.
Paper-restrictions reduced it to mere 28
pages (from 104 pages before the war), but its patriotism was never in
doubt–the paper set up a training school for the Home Guard while its
manufacturing units were alloted to create cheap mortar. The issue
Picture Post was confronted again and again was that of censorship. This
absurdity was exposed in one issue by running multiple images of
black-out photos (like above). Below these “Pictures We Would Like To
Publish,” captions read:
“Some of the Leaflets our Airmen
Dropped on Germany: Our country has at least done something in
propaganda. Our planes have dropped leaflets over Germany. But the
leaflets are a dead secret. Only Germans may read them. Britons may not.
We asked to be allowed to show them to you. Permission refused.”
“British Airmen Shoot Down German
Planes: A German raider crashes into a hillside — only one of dozens of
pictures we should like to publish. We cannot. we can see the need of a
reasonable censorship. We can’t see the need of a black-out. Can you?”
“British Troops Are in Comfort in the
Front Line: So well-built are the lines which British troops have
occupied in France that even in recent floods they are bone-dry. You see
troops enjoying lunch — or would if we are allowed to send a cameraman.
Repeated requests to War Office produce nothing but courteous
acknowledgments.”
Only picture printed on that page was this one which the original captions scathingly read:
“Our Thanks are due to them for the
pictures on these pages: the picture censorship department of the
Ministry of Information. Lord Raglan (centre) and two colleagues in the
department of the Ministry of Information, which decides which pictures
the press may have and which it may not. WIthout their cooperation and
far-seeing initiative, we could never have presented these exciting
pictures of Britain at war.
The public and authorities were able to laugh these censorships off with typical British “Mustn’t Grumble”. The Post‘s
publication peaked at 2 million copies a week in 1943, but it
eventually overstepped itself. The government cancelled its subsidies
the Post after it questioned the quality of some military equipment in the Middle East. Its last crusade was to release the photos of the destruction of the Farringdon Market by one of the last German V2 raids (March 8 1945), which didn’t happen until 1948!
Anne Frank
If a single individual could be held up
to “personify” the Holocaust, that person would be Anne Frank. On June
12th, 1942, Anne received a modest red-and-white-checkered, clothed covered diary
for her 13th birthday. On that day, she wrote in neat schoolgirl hand:
“I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never
been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great
support and comfort to me.”
Three weeks later, to escape an order of
deportation to Germany, Anne and her family went into hiding. Their home
for the next 25 months was a secret attic behind a bookcase at an old
building at 263 Prinsengracht Street in Amsterdam (now renamed
Annefrankhuis, and is a memorial to the 100,000 Dutch Jews who perished
in concentration camps). Anne Frank retained both her diary and sunny
look to life behind her confined quarters. Her ambition was to be a
writer and she used her diary to deal with both the boredom and her
youthful array of thoughts, which had as much to do with
personal relationships as with the war and the Nazi terror raging
outside.
On Tuesday, August 1st, 1944, Anne wrote
her final entry in her faithfully kept diary. The hiding place that Otto
Frank found for his family, the Van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer was
raided by Nazi forces three days later. They were betrayed by Gestapo
informers and its occupants were deported to Auschwitz. The Allied
forces which had landed in Normandy two months before arrived too late
to save the Franks. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen three months before her
16th birthday.
Her diary was discovered by friends, and
published by her father, the only member of the family to survive. The
Diary of a Young Girl, published in 1947, includes photos of Anne and
the people she hid with, plus a map of the secret annex in the house on
Prinsengracht. On the cover was the above haunting photograph taken by an automatic photovending machine
in 1939. The simple photograph of Anne gazing away with wistful
innocence into distant dreams that never materialized seems to be asking
‘why?’ to incomprehensible horrors unleashed by the Holocaust.
