Rose Cawood - Castle Douglas High School, Kirkcudbrightshire

Photographs

A little, slightly cheeky smile looks at me first. Then the tinier smile next to it, with an air of anxiousness. Their small black and white faces, smile so simply and so blissfully: the tragedy of their fate is almost too unbearable in my chest, so much that I cannot breathe for it. Their slight hands and bare feet curl and clutch the stone steps they sit on. One would not think they were posing or holding their expression rather that they were having a wonderful time. Playing in the garden on that hot summer's day; while their mother sat in her sun chair serenely watching and smiling gently to herself at these two beautiful children, the loves of her life, her everything and their innocent playing. Their father watching from the kitchen window, bursting with pride at these two scraps splashing water at each other. They grinned at their parents taking a picture not fully understanding what it was all about.

Half a year later, perhaps, their smile erased and worry in its place. Their father and mother looking drawn and unwell. Everyday, their father goes to do casual work; anything he can find, mother cooks what food she can find. They will not let the children out though, if they do; their mother tells them to look up, not at the ground, not at the skeletal bodies, not at the stinking ghetto, nor at the burly soldiers striking the elderly man or the sad faces: ghostly and broken. These two children; whose healthy faces once beamed with glee and warm happiness, now reduced to scarce wisps of worry and confusion.

Each a year older, and a year graver. They can read and understand the newspapers now, but not why they are supposed to be condemned. They do not understand why they have to stay in the ghetto or why they are supposed to walk in the gutters. Their mother just kisses their head gently and their father looks serious but neither explains why so much has changed and why they have to be punished.

The soldiers came, and told them that they can go away to a new place. A better place. A place that will bring them freedom. An efficient place. An industrious place. Their mother worries it will be cold and their father says nothing. They wait in a courtyard for hours. Then the trains. Hundreds stuffed in, like sub human creatures. Then the camps. Maybe the children have blocked it out, maybe it's a blur. Then into the fresh air, the children smell cooking, burnt meat. A colossal farm, with sheds as far as their wide eyes can see. No time to look. Right, mother and children, left, father. Their mother holds them tighter than she ever has, smothering their eyes and faces into her body, she wants to hide them, engulf them, so they never know.

An hour later. Their father sits on the frozen ground, cracked, broken, a man reduced to a pathetic sobbing chaos.

Maybe. A guess. Perhaps it happened that way. The lady tells us this as we look at the room with a sea of photographs. Nobody knows who they are. No names. No documents. No traces. Disappeared. That haunting thought echoes through my mind, the photo with the beaming smiles just like me and my little brother in so many photographs. So many photographs, every single one is unique. Millions. In every one, the suffering of one person, one family that is so profound it is like contemplating infinity, like trying to create millions of universes. And they do not even know how many people died.