Date: January 12, 2000
From: David Bowes
To: Aaron D. Levy
Subject: Dachau Photo Series

Dear Aaron:

I first learned about these photos at about age seven, when my grandfather caught me going through his sock drawer—trying on his service pins. I told him I wanted to be a soldier and he showed me some purportedly "cool" pictures such as his poses with halftracks, or pictures in which he held cigarettes in his teeth. He told me there were other photos he would show me later... I snuck back in his room at the earliest moment to see these forbidden photos, and I would continue to do so in the years that followed— but only when he was not there.

My grandfather never mentioned who took the photographs; indeed, he often pretended not to remember the war past his 80th year at all. He was drafted at the very old age of 38. At all times up until his death, he worked hard to keep his memories under tight wraps. His death kind of set that entrapment free in my mind and I have been rolling around in there—rolling it all around in there—ever since.

My grandfather's role in the war was in my mind always beyond heroics. He landed with the D-Day invasion, leaving from Bournemouthe / Poole and was a sergeant in his halftrack division before being injured. He had a bronze star, and he turned down both a trip home and the purple heart. He showed me his legs, which were at some point hit with shrapnel. He never walked with a limp though.

An interesting aspects of the photos became visible the other day when I was showing them, on the web, to a friend. I pointed out the photo of the young woman among the naked, dead bodies, and mentioned to him that I thought she was beautiful, and sensitive, in contrast to the twisting rotting horrors surrounding her face. For the first time since we had met, my friend was absolutely shocked by what I said. I noticed this and began to suspect that by seeing these photos as "my grandfather's" (though you and I both agree he probably did not take them) and knowing my whole life that they were in his drawer (where I was always allowed to get at them) I had seen them as something different than what their political, human, historical value would offer to someone who had seen them for the first time. I thought, I felt, that I had checked myself properly before; perhaps I was wrong.

I knew these photographs as "scenes"—filled with horror—but from the life of a man whom I saw as my hero. They were windows into his head. I was less than eight when I first saw the photos (I am starting to suspect a "counter-memory") I suppose my fascination with these photos, all natural and calm for a youngster, may have alleviated some of the confusion he had acquired in the time after he decided to record a snapshot, or carry them on his person on planes and boats so as to end up finally in that drawer. What he actually saw in that war was a mystery that I inherited in a shadowy, grainy, black and white form.

And those tongs... I was nine when I first saw a pair of antique ice-tongs in an upstate New York shop; I strangely drew a picture of the shop man and spelled the word "Dachau" on another piece of paper. That was the writing you now have on the outside of the envelope.) Hey, I wear stripped pajamas too! This was my painful remembrance of the time, an adolescent fascination which, however perverse, allowed me to identify, to relate to, if you will, the Holocaust.

The visual content of the object does involve some temporal aspects (the historical; oral testimony; grandpa's physical experiences), but not the smell of it. I know they are bodies, and I shall always know this. But they were not dead when he saw them—not as dead as they are to me. The face of that girl—I am sure he saw bodies before he saw these prints—was "undead" to him. It was a resonating, un-killable memory of a body I've always seen as naturally, though nonetheless horrifically, dead. Somewhere, at some point, I began to think, "Of course she's dead. In a pile of the dead. This is the Holocaust."

In fact, I experienced from the beginning feelings that were technically not my own. Like shame, and sensitivity, even something like pity. The melodrama of the history of the holocaust (the idea of "History" in my class buttressed all this; so did TV mini-series in the mid-seventies) began to fill these images with additional meanings. I always spoke about them. You were the first "outsider" I showed them to. I probably showed them because of their significance, a sense of obligation. They remain in my possession as photos, however, above all—photos of people who do not exist, of the potentiality of wars and technology. Above all I have learned this: Such a pile of bodies is a political symbol. A pure one.

All for now -

David