"What are all those names?" one asked.
"Are these all victims? Oh my god!"

Well said, girls.

Sure enough, there was a huge pile of at least 1,000 shoes and it got the attention of a girl walking by with her mother. The girl asked, "How did they get all of those shoes?" I did not hear her mother's response but whatever her explanation about what the shoes represented, the girl's response said it all: "Ew!"

A poem is printed above the pile of shoes, a poem by Yiddish poet Moses Schulstein:

"We are the shoes, We are the last witnesses
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers.
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh,
Each one of us avoided the Hellfire"

Sharing Stories

I always looked forward to writing about Holocaust survivors who would go out of their way to tell their stories as often as possible to people, in hopes their stories will not be forgotten. Looking back, I am embarrassed at my attempts to understand and connect with them. I remember asking one if he had read Maus, Art Spiegelman's award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. I was reaching for a cultural vantage point to connect. That seems shallow to me now. With a sense of purpose, I would share their stories via my articles, although it was always difficult to convey all the pain and frustration they suffered in the 15 or less paragraphs I was allotted in the newspaper. Coincidentally, it was again shoes that helped explain one part of the World War II story: The American soldiers memories of it.

I have interviewed many war veterans during my reporting work and am always fascinated by their stories. I see them as not just an interview but almost an attempt to have them help me and my readers better understand history. There is one veteran in particular that I remember well. I had interviewed several veterans for an earlier anniversary related to the war. While other veterans had told me war was, for them personally, not dangerous or scary, he was telling me that he was terrified at times. I believed him and thought the others were lying or had selective memory. Perhaps they were feeling macho or defensive. But how was I going to square the varying accounts of these veterans? So I asked him. And what was his answer?
"Shoes."

It seems he took an art class once and they were each told to draw a picture of a shoe. He looked at his picture and it appeared perfect to him. He then looked at the picture of a shoe drawn by his neighbor and could not understand how their picture was supposed to be a shoe. He realized it was the same with other people's pictures - none looked like his. It dawned on him that the shoe assignment was like the memories of war veterans - each took away from the war something different, perceived and recalled in a unique way. I loved this analogy. He stared at me as I excitedly scribbled down his sage words. I think he may have been worried I was going to screw him over and make him look like a coward. At times during that interview, he acted like I was old and mature, mentioning obscure bits of war trivia that I barely understood. But then he'd say self-deprecating things like, "You're going to go back to the newsroom and say, 'That man is crazy!'" He also gave me my favorite war quote, which I used as a lead paragraph for one of the stories for the Arkansas newspaper I worked for at the time. "The war was a learning experience," the veteran said. I learned, he said, "that I didn't want to do it again." When I told him I could have guessed that without actually going, he looked like he was going to hug me. I only spent an hour with him but he provided me with a fresh perspective on the war