The high shelf.

The books were in a quiet room, high up on a shelf, in between the Leon Urises and Richard Papes and 1950s Readers Digests, and the middle-brow 1950s coloured-spine Book Club selections that confettied a million safe middle-class bookshelves in the post-war years.

I pulled them out when no-one else was around. I was ten or eleven. I could just reach the highest shelf. They were grouped together, like breast-to-breast Zebra Finches perched in an aviary of budgerigars, their own special little genre.

The dozen or so books had black-and-white photo sections. No colour: black-and-white is artful, shocking, intimate.

You couldn't help looking. Bodies, naked. Skin, too much skin, too much detail. Thin. Multiple. Arms, legs in all directions. Rolling over each other. Then other photos. Strange objects that looked obscene. Then the clothing that the bodies had discarded. Massive piles, like some rag trade warehouse that had been upended. Teeth. False. Shoes.

Shoes were the worst. Shoes are the most shocking image of human destruction.

Especially - especially - the shoes of children.

Children.

I was one myself.

I hastily slid the books back into their own special little genre section when I heard anyone coming.

The books stayed with me in memory but the actual books got lost along the way. I suspect the adults' opinions about keeping such volumes changed over time. After the war they must have had newsworthy shock value, like a third-world earthquake that kills millions and then just becomes distasteful to keep thinking about. The books disappeared but their images remained. In my mind, anyway. Maybe the world moved on, to Kerouac novels and progressive rock and dinner parties with French food.

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Elie Weisel: Confronting the Silence

by Joseph Berger

Published 2023

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'After he arrived at Auschwitz, Eliezer never saw his mother and younger sister again.’