A German mortar crew in the ruins of Stalingrad. August, 1942
The city is a corpse. It has been dead for weeks, but it does not stop burning. The mortar crew crouches in the ruins, hunched figures in uniforms stiff with sweat and grime.
A shell lands somewhere nearby. The ground heaves, bricks shatter, dust rises in great choking clouds. No one flinches. They have learned that fear is a luxury, an indulgence for those who still believe they will survive this war. Here, in the ruins of Stalingrad, there is only the next shot, the next order, the next moment. Nothing beyond that.
The mortar tube is warm, too warm. It has been fired too many times already. Someone mutters about how it will crack soon, how the barrel will warp and send a shell right back at them. Someone else shrugs. They all know what’s coming anyway. The supplies are running low. The Russians never stop attacking. The officers keep saying they will take the Volga, but the Volga might as well be on the moon.
One of the men, Weber, wipes his forehead and smears a streak of dust and dried blood across his temple. He used to talk about home, about his mother’s kitchen, about the lake where he used to swim as a boy. He doesn’t anymore. None of them do. Home feels like something that happened to other people. It belongs to the past, to a version of themselves that was buried somewhere under the rubble weeks ago.
A plane hums overhead, a dark shape against the blinding sky. They cannot tell whose it is. It doesn’t matter. It drops its payload somewhere farther down the line, and a great column of smoke rises. It looks like the earth itself is exhaling.
They reload. Aim. Fire. There is no thought to it anymore, no sense of strategy or purpose. Just the dull rhythm of war, as mechanical as breathing. They do not think about where the shell lands, whether it finds a trench, a machine gun nest, a man no different from them. They cannot afford to think about that.
Hunger gnaws at them. The bread is mostly sawdust now. The soup, when they get it, is water with a handful of cabbage floating in it. Winter is coming. Someone makes a joke about how Stalingrad will be colder than hell. No one laughs.
They fire again. The city remains, ruined and unmoving, waiting for the war to end. The war does not end.
Brothers Sril and Zelig Jacob shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz, 1944.
Two boys stand before the abyss, their childhoods still clinging to them like the oversized coats they wear. Sril and Zelig Jacob, brothers. They do not yet understand. Or perhaps they do, in that way children sometimes grasp the unspeakable before adults dare to name it. Their faces—set, solemn—bear no illusions.
Did they look for their mother in the crowd? Did their father tell them to stay together before being torn away by hands that did not hesitate? Already, they have learned not to cry. The fear is there, but it is silent, swallowed, held inside because here, even fear has rules.
A soldier will point left or right. Life or death, survival or smoke. A flick of the wrist is all it takes. Did they still hold hands when they were pushed forward? Did one glance back for a final glimpse of home—home, which was now only a memory?
It is winter, but they do not shiver from the cold alone. The air here is thick with the scent of burning flesh, but perhaps they have not yet dared to name it. Not yet.
Soon, they will learn.
Soon, they will know the cruelty of hunger, the weight of a shovel in hands too small to carry such burdens. They will hear the cries of men, of women, of children like them, crying out for a God who does not answer. They will feel the world forget them, turn its back, pretend it does not see.
Or perhaps, within the hour, they will walk forward, past the barbed wire, past the walls, into the showers where no water flows.
Two boys stand before the abyss. The world stood silent. And silence, too, is a crime.
An advertisement for a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina.
The ink on the page is bold, deliberate, unashamed. It calls out to the wealthy, to the landowners, to the men who see their fields as kingdoms and their slaves as the spoils. It is a notice, a transaction, a reckoning—though not for the ones who wrote it.
Two hundred and fifty souls, packed tight into the dark belly of a ship named Bance Island, their bodies salted by the ocean, their names stolen before they even set foot on Carolina soil. They are not men, women, children. They are “a choice cargo.” They are “fine, healthy.” They are assigned value like cotton, like sugar, like rice.
They have been inspected, mouths pried open like livestock, muscles prodded, backs examined for scars. They are being sold with a promise: no disease, no danger. The utmost care has been taken, the ad reassures, as if this world has ever cared for them. As if their suffering is not measured in lash marks and separation, in the wailing of a mother left behind, in the silence of a father thrown overboard before the ship reached shore.
Their futures stretch before them like endless rows of cane, of indigo, of cotton—harvest after harvest, child after child born into chains. And the men who penned these words, Austin, Laurens, and Appleby, they will count their money, sip their rum, and sleep well at night.
The ink on the page is bold, deliberate, unashamed. And centuries later, it still burns.
Man standing on lap of colossal figure of Ramses, 1856
The man stands on the lap of a god, diminutive yet resolute, a flicker of life against the immensity of stone. He is an intruder here, though the colossus does not seem to mind. Ramses, inscrutable, ancient, sits with the patience of eternity, his gaze fixed on some distant horizon beyond the affairs of men. The desert stretches out behind them, vast and impassive, the sky pale with heat. Time here does not flow so much as it lingers, pooling in the hollows of statues, in the quiet spaces between sand and stone.
One wonders what the man thinks as he stands there. Perhaps he is in awe, sensing the weight of centuries pressing upon him. Or perhaps he feels nothing at all, as men often do in the face of history, caught up in their own small motions—measuring, recording, moving on. The 19th century has a way of flattening the past into something to be cataloged and displayed, its grandeur reduced to an illustration in an academic journal or a curio for gentlemen’s parlors.
And yet Ramses endures, not merely as a relic but as a monument to an age when kings were gods and their dominion stretched beyond death. He was Ramses II, the Great, the builder of empires, the master of men. His name was carved upon temples from the Nile Delta to Nubia; he waged war and signed treaties; he built cities that bore his name, towering over the land as he himself towers here in stone. He was the Pharaoh of Pharaohs, the living embodiment of Amun-Ra, and his likeness—colossal, imposing—was meant to humble all who stood before it. Even now, though the centuries have softened his kingdom to ruin, his image remains. It was not enough for Ramses to rule in life; he sought to rule eternity as well.
But eternity does not belong to men. His empire faded, as all empires do. The temples collapsed, the gods were forgotten, and the great cities of his reign sank beneath the sands. Time, with its quiet, patient erosion, took what it was owed. Only this remains: stone, carved with his face, staring outward, impassive.
And now a man stands upon his lap, dwarfed by the sheer scale of ambition. He does not belong here, yet here he is, just as others have stood before him and will stand after. His name will not be remembered. Not like Ramses. Not like the pharaoh who built temples to reach beyond death.
Even as the sun beats down, even as the desert whispers around them, the colossus does not move. The man will descend, step back into the tide of his own brief history, and be forgotten. But Ramses—Ramses will remain, watching over the empty landscape, waiting for no one.
Ho Chi Minh, then known as Nguyen Ai Quoc, in France in 1919 to advocate for the independence of Vietnam.
It is a face you could pass by in the streets of Paris without a second glance—sharp features, hollow cheeks, a threadbare suit that hangs loosely over a frame too thin to fill it. A colonial subject in the belly of the empire, he moves through the boulevards like a shadow, unnoticed, unimportant. And yet, there is something in the eyes—dark, unwavering, watchful. The look of a man who knows that history does not favor the quiet, that power does not concern itself with the desperate.
Nguyen Ai Quoc, as he calls himself now, has come to France not to beg but to be heard. He has written his petition—eight demands, careful, measured, dressed in the language of diplomacy and reason. A request for self-determination, for representation, for Vietnam to be something more than a line on a ledger in a colonial office. But no one listens. He stands at the gates of Versailles, hands outstretched, offering words to men who do not care to read them.
Perhaps he still believes in France. Perhaps he still believes in the promises of liberté, égalité, fraternité, in the ideals men carve into marble while turning away those who ask for their share of it. Or perhaps he has already begun to understand: power does not yield to words alone. If he does not know it yet, he will soon. The kitchen where he washes dishes will teach him, the factory where he labors for coins will teach him, the closed doors and empty replies will teach him.
One day, they will know his name—not as a petitioner in Paris, but as Ho Chi Minh, the man who shaped Vietnam’s fate as much as it shaped his. Some will see him as a liberator, the man who forced empires to retreat. Others will see him as something darker—the architect of a revolution that replaced one yoke with another, a leader whose dream of unity demanded a terrible price. The war will come, as it always does, and the world will watch as Vietnam’s jungles burn, as its cities crumble, as history carves its verdict in blood and fire.
But all of that is still in the future. For now, he is just a man standing in the cold, unnoticed, dismissed. If history has a sense of irony, it is this—that the ignored man in Paris will one day make the most powerful nations of the world listen, whether they want to or not.
A revolution is coming. And like all revolutions, it will not ask who survives it.
