[Leica] IMG: a world that no longer exists

[Howard Ritter]

A beautiful and moving collection and remembrance, Nathan.

I’ve recently been going through my late mother’s photos that she inherited from her father, Karl Kruecke, who emigrated from Verden an der Aller in Germany to the U.S. in 1913. Nothing there to compare with the ghosts in your photos, but one that I was seeing for the first time was of a handsome, virile young German soldier at leisure in an informal uniform in a yard, with the inscription on the back, “Arthur 1942”. I realized this would have been my mother’s cousin, the son of my grandfather’s brother, also Arthur, who stayed behind when Karl went off to America. I realized that I was looking at the ghost of that apocryphal relative of ours whom we talked about in tragic tones as kids, our “second cousin who never returned from the Russian front.” I hope that at his tender age of 20 or so, he was more a patriotic German than an acolyte of Hitler, as innocent as any German who joined the Wehrmacht could have been, and in his way also a victim of the Nazis as well. Whatever, he paid the ultimate price.

—howard


> On Dec 8, 2015, at 2:32 PM, Nathan Wajsman <photo at frozenlight.eu> wrote:
> 
> Jim’s pictures of his family from the 20th century inspire me to share pictures from Lublin, Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. I inherited these pictures from my father after he died in 2004, and have scanned them but I have not been able (emotionally) to do anything serious with them. I just note that they have held up very well considering what they have been through, and that they depict a world that was brutally destroyed. The vast majority of the people you see in these pictures perished in the Holocaust, including my father’s younger brother, after whom I am named:
> 
> http://www.greatpix.eu/A-world-that-vanished/
> 
> Cheers,
> Nathan
> 
> Nathan Wajsman
> Alicante, Spain
> http://www.frozenlight.eu <http://www.frozenlight.eu/>
> http:// <http://www.greatpix.eu/>www.greatpix.eu
> PICTURE OF THE WEEK: http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws <http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws>Blog: http://nathansmusings.wordpress.com/ <http://nathansmusings.wordpress.com/>
> Cycling: http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/belgiangator <http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/belgiangator>
> YNWA
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