Happy Hog Rot

This is one of the photographs that I most remembered, and was terrified by, from early childhood, when I would pore over my grandmother’s volumes of books on the illustrated history of World War II. Both of her sons — my uncles — fought in that war. I don’t know who published those encyclopedia-like hardback volumes, maybe one book for each year of the war with a volume each for prewar and postwar coverage, but they were the most compelling reading during our visits to her home from about 1946 – 1952. I never learned what happened to the set after my grandmother passed. The Goebbels portrait stuck with me as much as did the hundreds and hundreds of horrifying scenes of battle and corpses and Holocaust survivors. Only many years later, when I was an adult, did I realize that the image was a signature piece by the legendary photographer, Alfred Eisenstaedt.