It’s less amazing than it is simply striking.

Having grown up Jewish, I’ve read and watched an egregious amount about the Holocaust. I visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s principal Holocaust museum in July, and saw some extremely graphic images of the concentration camps. One of the videos shown was of masses of bodies being rapidly buried after liberation; and the other was of thousands of rotting corpses being burned in ovens at Belzec.

Some of my classmates cried at seeing these videos—but I didn’t. I cried a number of times that day, but that wasn’t one of them. Images of torture, enslavement and genocide are sickening and disgusting, but they didn’t do much except send shivers down my spine.

It’s not that they’re not horrific, because they absolutely are; it’s just that the brain can’t even begin to comprehend images like that. How can it? I can’t comprehend the death of six million people, and neither can you. At the end of the day, the Holocaust is something very human, and that’s exactly what the image above is.

It’s just so heartbreaking, so intimate, so human.

In it, the Nazi mocks a Jewish man, humiliating him by pulling on his sidelocks, an ancient practice commanded by Jewish Law.

It’s an image of one man, but his gaunt, horrified face speaks for millions.

The Nazi’s smirk juxtaposed with the Jew’s sheer terror is a deeply unpleasant image, and recalls all the things that caused the Holocaust in the first place. The Jew is no longer a person, but a grotesque idea; one made to be mocked, humiliated, and eventually—stamped out. Their innocence didn’t matter and their humanity didn’t exist. Nazis shoved Jews into gas chambers and slept well at night.

The frightening, very real cruelty of the photograph is amazing; it’s by far, the most striking image of the Holocaust I’ve seen. It impacted me far more than any image of torture or starvation ever could.

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