That box is so sad, because when a young couple puts on a wedding ring for the first time, it symbolizes in part hope for their future. None of the rings in that box followed their bearer to the place they wished to be.
A few of the thousands of wedding rings the Germans removed from holocaust victims to salvage the gold. The U.S. troops found rings, watches, precious stones, eyeglasses, and gold fillings, near Buchenwald concentration camp, on 5 May 1945. From the photo description on Wikimedia.
Truly a harrowing shot; knowing there were hopes of so many people embedded in those bands, all perished and broken.
It's always pictures like this that get to me about the holocaust. Something about the pictures of the emaciated people at the fence as they're being liberated has them stripped of humanity. Like it isn't real. There isn't anything there that I as a human being living in today's world can relate to. But, the shoes, the wedding bands, the cutlery, the clothes. That's where I see the tragedy come to life. Because each of those things represents a fragment of a life that I can relate to. Each one of those things is something that defined a person and it was systematically stripped from them. It's, "Get in line, take off the symbol of your love. Remove your jewelry, the symbol of your hard world. Take off your shoes and your clothes, that which separates man from beast. Take everything and separate it into the correct bin. Let me take from you everything that outwardly defines you." It's in each of these things that I see a story. But they're stories that have been cast aside with the intent to destroy from the collective memory of our species. Instead we found them, anonymous anecdotes about love, about life, about home, about a future that was cut short, fragments of a whole with no way to put them back together. I see these things heartbroken because no matter how hard we try, we will never know the true suffering and struggle each of these people endured.
It reminds me of this quote, “Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?” ― Irvin D. Yalom
For each of these people, an entire nation put all of their effort to really, truly bring about the death of entire subsection of the human population. They sought not just to end their earthly existence, but to stamp out the soul of who they were before erasing the memory that they were ever here in the first place.
![image showing Wedding bands that were removed from holocaust victims before they were executed [3000x2372]](522274a4-25c5-5d4e-8f90-2344973379a4.jpg)
price101 on October 14th, 2017 at 04:24 UTC »
That box is so sad, because when a young couple puts on a wedding ring for the first time, it symbolizes in part hope for their future. None of the rings in that box followed their bearer to the place they wished to be.
DreamInBinary on October 14th, 2017 at 05:12 UTC »
Truly a harrowing shot; knowing there were hopes of so many people embedded in those bands, all perished and broken.
Made_in_Murica on October 14th, 2017 at 06:28 UTC »
It's always pictures like this that get to me about the holocaust. Something about the pictures of the emaciated people at the fence as they're being liberated has them stripped of humanity. Like it isn't real. There isn't anything there that I as a human being living in today's world can relate to. But, the shoes, the wedding bands, the cutlery, the clothes. That's where I see the tragedy come to life. Because each of those things represents a fragment of a life that I can relate to. Each one of those things is something that defined a person and it was systematically stripped from them. It's, "Get in line, take off the symbol of your love. Remove your jewelry, the symbol of your hard world. Take off your shoes and your clothes, that which separates man from beast. Take everything and separate it into the correct bin. Let me take from you everything that outwardly defines you." It's in each of these things that I see a story. But they're stories that have been cast aside with the intent to destroy from the collective memory of our species. Instead we found them, anonymous anecdotes about love, about life, about home, about a future that was cut short, fragments of a whole with no way to put them back together. I see these things heartbroken because no matter how hard we try, we will never know the true suffering and struggle each of these people endured.
It reminds me of this quote, “Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?” ― Irvin D. Yalom
For each of these people, an entire nation put all of their effort to really, truly bring about the death of entire subsection of the human population. They sought not just to end their earthly existence, but to stamp out the soul of who they were before erasing the memory that they were ever here in the first place.