Photographs He Couldn’t Keep – and the Truth We Must

By Michael D. Peabody –

When I was a child—perhaps nine or ten years old—I found myself thumbing through one of my grandfather’s old photo albums. He had served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War and had been stationed in Germany near the war’s end. The photographs began simply enough: black-and-white images of military vehicles, uniformed soldiers standing beside one another, scenes of wartime life that seemed distant, even to a young boy.

Then I turned a page.

What I saw next was something I couldn’t fully comprehend at the time—stacks of human remains, lifeless bodies, frozen in images that defied reason. I didn’t understand what I was looking at. My stomach sank. I asked my mother, and in an effort to protect me from the full weight of it, she gently explained that Grandpa had been present when the concentration camps were liberated. He had taken those pictures himself. She said it would be better if I didn’t look too long.

That night, I had a nightmare. It was horrifying.

Years passed. The images faded in clarity but not in significance. As I grew older, I began to feel a desire to preserve my grandfather’s legacy. I wanted to see those photos again, to hold onto the proof of what he had witnessed. But when I asked about them, I learned they were no longer with us.

My grandfather had been watching television one evening when a guest on the program—a Holocaust denier—claimed it had never happened. That man stood before a camera and lied with a straight face. My grandfather, outraged but not shouting, didn’t write a letter or try to argue. He went to the closet, took out the photographs, and mailed them to the television station.

That’s who he was. Quiet, but unwavering. A man who had seen evil firsthand and would not let it be forgotten.

Now those pictures are gone. And with every passing year, the number of people who saw what he saw continues to diminish. The voices that once bore witness fall silent, and time threatens to erode the memories they carried. But there is a truth that time cannot erase: evil grows strongest when it is ignored. When people look the other way. When conscience is traded for convenience, and when silence is mistaken for safety.

There’s a sobering lesson in that.

History’s greatest crimes were not committed by monsters acting alone. They were made possible by ordinary men and women who stayed quiet. Who followed orders. Who looked away. Who told themselves, “It’s not my place,” or “Someone else will speak up.” And so they didn’t. And so it continued.

What are we, then, if we do not speak when evil rises? What kind of people do we become when we wait for someone else to show courage, just so we don’t have to?

The Scriptures ask us plainly: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not He who weighs the heart perceive it?” (Proverbs 24:11-12). We are not judged only by what we do, but by what we refuse to do. Silence, in the face of injustice, is not a refuge. It is a failing.

My grandfather understood that. And though the photos are gone, the truth they carried is not. It lives in his decision to speak. And it lives now in those of us who remember. Who choose not to forget. Who refuse to let lies go unchallenged, even when it’s uncomfortable. Even when it’s easier to stay quiet.

We don’t remember the past for the sake of nostalgia. We remember because forgetting leads to repeating. And if we do not tell these stories—if we do not carry the burden of memory—then who will?

The past does not belong to the dead. It is a responsibility handed down to the living.

Let us carry it with honor.