In the early 1930s a little girl named Mary
was filmed by her parents. The family films show Mary playing, eating sand on a beach, sitting in her chair, throwing a stick for a dog, and riding a poney. Mary's present-day London neighbor was able to digitize those early shots, and added a sound track of Harry Nilsson's "Remember" as a special present for Mary's 80th birthday. As you watch this charming vignette, watch for something rather special at about 1:30.The image above is a public domain image from the Library of Congress collection. The photographer is Dorothea Lange. The woman in the 1936 photo is a 32-year old migrant pea-picker named Florence Thompson, shown with three of her seven children. It's part of a series of photos Lange took of migrant mothers. In an article some 24 years later Lange said that
How will we remember the Holocaust when the last of the survivors dies? The Nazis unwittingly helped preserve some of the memories, by meticulously documenting and accounting their genocide - never has murder been so well catalogued. There will, of course, be the plethora of books and movies and articles and poems and plays. But what will the Holocaust mean, when its voices speak only from recordings and recitations? Will things change? What will the world look like thirty-five years from now, in 2045, and what will the Holocaust look like to that world? Ancient history? Boring history? Irrelevant history?
