Behind the Story: Graham Stecklein on “Big Noses, Little Impact”
By Graham Clark Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Stop me even if you haven’t heard it, actually. Because it’s an inappropriate joke, and I can hardly be said to have the right to tell it. But it speaks to bigger issues, so I’ll tell it anywhere. A rabbi is sitting in a café […]
Reflecting on Auschwitz
By Dustin Volz I am walking deliberately through a row of still-standing brick barracks of the Holocaust’s most well-known landmark, a place that annually draws more than a million visitors. Despite the remnants of genocide—-a sardonic welcome sign promising salvation through work, a well-preserved gas chamber, a room filled with mountains of human hair—it’s impossible […]
Behind the Story: Dustin Volz on Sitting with Journalism’s Diversity Problem
By Dustin Volz Toward the end of our second day exploring Auschwitz, I found myself alone amid a row of barracks, unsure where the rest of the group had wandered. Closing time at the memorial was near. The dirt path was empty of other visitors, and the setting sun cast a deep shadow on the […]
Towards A More Apt Gradient of Incomprehension
By Graham Clark Ever hear that phase, “What you don’t know could fill a book?” I started working on something on my way out of Europe. A plan that couldn’t fail, even when so many of my projects fizzle out before completion, because this would be essentially undoable in the first place. It is to […]
Just Looking
By KAREN PETREE He’s not looking at me directly, as if he’s too afraid. But I don’t want him to. I stare at him apprehensively where he’s frozen for 1/100th of a second in 1943. Though there are a lot of people in the group of Jews being evacuated from the Warsaw Ghetto, the boy […]
Journalism at Auschwitz
By SAMANTHA PICKETTE Journalists, by definition, have a way with words. Speechlessness is not a part of the profession. Even when unimaginable tragedies occur, journalists are first on the scene with a pen in one hand and a camera in the other. Still, despite my training, I don’t know what to say about Auschwitz. I’ve […]