Unknown photographer from the Auschwitz Erkennungsdienst. Several sources believe the photographer to have been SS officers Ernst Hoffmann or Bernhard Walter, who ran the Erkennungsdienst., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper having watched the Ken Burns TV series on the US role in the leadup to the Holocaust, realizes that his birthdate makes him a virtual child of the most unthinkable horror mankind has perpetrated on itself.
While he was learning to walk and talk, Hitler was writing “Mein Kampf.” During his school years, the murdering factories were at peak capacities. And as he entered high school, the unbelievable tally of death to soldiers and civilians–Jews especially, was being added up.
The keeper’s participation in the forgotten Korean “police action” aimed at curtailing obscene power-hungry personalities with Holocaust-like disregard shaped the rest of his life.
That it has taken all the years of his long existence to fully grasp the dimensions of the Holocaust, should perhaps be no surprise given that Jim Crow still roosts in the trees where the keeper and his crowd hang out.
And now current remnants of what drove the Holocaust rise up like poisonous serpents in the keeper’s old age, and there seems to be no escaping the fact that its horrors will be with him for the rest of his years.
