Jewish prisoners after being liberated from a death train, 1945
The world had turned upside down, and these people were walking out of its darkest shadow. The train sat there like an iron relic of everything monstrous, its doors flung open to reveal the ghosts it carried, now stepping out into a landscape that might as well have been a different planet. Grass underfoot. Trees bending in the wind. The air itself, crisp and indifferent, as though it hadn’t borne witness to their suffering. And yet, they moved. They didn’t collapse in the mud or retreat back into the cars that had been their tombs-in-waiting. They moved forward.