Excerpt from Part One: A Box of Letters – Page 34

Love, Bill: Finding My Father through Letters from World War II by Jan Krulick-Belin

Excerpt from Part One: A Box of Letters – Page 34:

Orlando, Florida
December 2002

We all decided to converge in Florida that Chanukah to go
through Mom’s things. Since we had pared down most of her
belongings the year before, it was a matter of dividing up the few
belongings that she had moved with her to Florida.

We first tackled the boxes of photo albums. In our current age of
digital imagery, where every picture can retain its freshness, be
instantly corrected, transported, shared, phoned, and animated, an
actual photograph has become a rare artifact. Examining old photo
albums, some of them more than fifty years old, has become an
archaic ritual, and yet these tangible records speak more loudly of history
and memory than does anything else. Filled with hundreds of
forgotten images, they drag the past into the present and remind us of
things that we’ve long erased. The brittle black-and-white photos with
their scalloped white borders can conjure up ghosts of those people
we recognize, as well as confront us with the strangers we don’t.