Stan [ to Fran and JM] your reactions
are understandable. Being reminded of past horrors is something we naturally
shun...The cry in one of the earliest notes smuggled from the death camps was
Record and Remember... The LIFE magazine STILL photos, however crisp and
chilling, really are melyuzga (small fry) in comparison.
JM: The horror of these particular Life
magazine photos is distinct from all the others, related to "record and
remember." They are monumental and colored, festively expressing the
terrible totalitarian aesthetics of "classical beauty," the deluded
enthusiastical youngsters unaware of their own doom. I never met my
grand-parents who lived in Berlin during the war, nor did my father ever speak
about them. And yet, reading what was set down on the back of some of the family
photographs that reached me after my father's death, I realized that all of
them had managed to survive the bombings, to die one after the other from
hunger, depression and old age, within short intervals of time and in less than
a year.This is the silent record I keep of another, altogether distinct,
horror and a puzzling tragedy.
The Berlin images struck me being the mockery of all that
is truly beautiful, simple and good and liable to be engulfed by the
perverse strivings for power and inhuman "perfection," still popping all
over. Curiously, what most affected me, in a positive way, in some
of Nabokov's descriptions of Berlin was his constant reference to
a disorderly landscape, compounded by the trash of discarded
bottles and tyres in an idyllic wood, mainly because he accepted these
elements as part of its "beauty." A sensitive and appropriate "Till
Eulenspiegel" touch.