The little boy in the bucket is called Eric Louis Löwenthal.


 Little Eric is less than a year old in this photo, taken on the eve of WWII in Enschede, the Netherlands. Four years later, he was taken to the gas chamber in Auschwitz and killed. He looks so harmless, so cheerful. Has no clue what brutal fate awaits him. How could he possibly have known, this charming little lad?

There are more crimes and cruel choices made in the history of the world than there are stars in the universe. Humanity has a near-infinite capacity for abject cruelty. But nothing quite shocks me as much as those who would take a small child and harm it. To see any baby, chubby-faced, cherubic, incapable of any wicked act, and destroy it, just because it is the “wrong kind of baby”? I cannot just wrap my head around that…


Little Eric in his bucket broke me a little because of how absolutely delighted he looks at being in that bucket. It must have been a warm day; he’s having a little bath, the sun is shining and life is good for him in that moment. He would have been 85, had the war not broken out; his picture should have been a cute memory in a family photo album, passed along by his grandchildren. Instead, it is a memorial to human cruelty.

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