Mick Hartley

The Atlantic's In Focus photo gallery continues with its weekly 20-part series on the Second World War. Today is #18: The Holocaust. Forty-five pictures: mostly – you are warned – of unspeakable horror. In this well-known AP photograph the horror is, at least, implicit: 

"A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945."

Picture #2, "The Last Jew in Vinnitsa" is another familiar image which never loses its chilling power. And #7, which I hadn't seen before, is……well, isn't there some basic human instinct which sees a naked body as vulnerable, piteous? Look closely and you'll see  small children there…

I remember my father, who fought in the war, saying "They'll never believe it, future generations….they'll never believe such a thing was possible." I, of course, didn't agree with him. How could people not believe it, with all the evidence?

I was, perhaps, a little naive.