Extraordinarily Banal...

is my first impression of the lives of S.S. officers depicted in the photographs from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I stumbled across it via an article in the New York Times Arts section this morning and waited impatiently for the day to end, so I could go home and pull up the on-line exhibit on my laptop.

When I was young, the first thing I did whenever I visited my grandparents was pull one of the three volumes of The People's Almanac from my grandfather's bookshelves. I would spend hours reading these books from cover to cover and learned about everything from the Everleigh sisters (1) to how famous people died. I loved the books so much that my grandfather went out, purchased Volume 2 and sent it home with my mother with instructions to give it to me.

But the entry that left the deepest impression was on Josef Mengele from the first volume. Wallace and Wallechinsky's detailed descriptions of his experiments on prisoners left me alternately enthralled and fearful that he would have experimented on my twin brother and myself. This was during the time that I was also reading Judy Blume's Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself (2) and the Diary of Anne Frank. Strange now to think how, at age eight, these somewhat disparate pieces of literature converged to give me a lifelong interest in the Holocaust.

I don't remember seeing a photograph of Mengele with that entry. Perhaps there was one. In my memory, reading about his experiments, I conceived of something monstrous. The Mengele of my imagination looked like a hairless, slightly older Colonel Dietrich (3) in a lab coat, forever fixed in his laboratory.

The Mengele of the Höecker album looks ordinary, like someone I would talk to while in line at the coffee shop. Photos of him on retreat and hanging around the camp, sometimes with arms crossed, sometimes smiling. The context of prisoners has been removed from all the frames, leading the viewer to believe that this is just another ordinary military base. The captions, the narration, the history is a necessary juxtaposition to jar the viewer into remember where they all are – in a death camp.

Notes:
(1) Read Karen Abbott's Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America's Soul for more information on the sisters and the time period in which they ran their brothel. I have not read it (yet) but the reviews have been good.
(2) I confess that I really enjoy pulling up reader reviews for controversial books and/or authors, sorting them by “Lowest Rating First” and reading why people hate the book.
(3) One of the villains (a Nazi, naturally) in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.