Free Remembering Dresden (Jack Turner Suspense Series Book 2) by Dan Walsh Page B

metal. One showed two boys sweeping a concrete floor. Another showed four boys filling up burlap bags with rocks—or were they potatoes—picking them up by hand. The odd thing was, Jack didn’t see any parents or grandparents in any of the pictures.
    Whenever he looked at their old family photo albums, they were mostly filled with adults, posing. Relatives from every branch of the family tree. Kids might be in a few of them, but not every one. If they were, they were smiling. Everybody smiled. Even in pics Jack had seen taken in the black-and-white era.
    But no one smiled in these. What had they gone through and what were they still going through when these pictures were taken that could take away all of these children’s smiles?
    Another thing Jack remembered from his family’s old photo albums was that people often wrote things on the back. The pics were usually glued to the paper, the corners tucked into little tabs. But over the years, some would break loose. He turned another page and saw that one had broken free and was tucked into the center crease. He lifted it out and looked at the front.
    Finally, an adult. Two in fact. Both women. They were dishing out watery soup from a tall silvery kettle to a line of anxious children all holding little white bowls. A few children in the foreground sat at a wooden table spooning away. Were these the same children that were in the first three pages? Jack wasn’t sure.
    He turned the photograph over and read the words:
     
    Das bin ich, das dritte Kind in der Schlange. Ich vergesse , der das Foto nahm. Vielleicht 6 Monate nach der ich eine Waise. Alle in diesem Foto sind Waisen.
     
    Okay, he didn’t expect that. Looked like German, which likely meant the date in the picture wasn’t during The Depression, after all. It was more likely in Germany after World War II. Rachel had taken German in college, but he wasn’t sure how fluent she was and didn’t want to bother her with this. Then he remembered Google Translate. Rachel had told him it wasn’t always accurate but you could often get the general idea of something using it.
    Bringing the photo to his laptop, he opened the program, selected German and typed the words into the left box exactly as they appeared. As he did, these words appeared on the right box in English:
     
    That's me, the third child in line. I forget who took the photo. Maybe 6 months after I become an orphan. All in this photo are orphans.
     
    Jack turned the photo over and focused on the third child in the soup line. It was hard to tell his age. Maybe eight, maybe ten. He had light brown hair, parted to the side. He wasn’t looking into the camera. His eyes focused like lasers on the lady’s hand dishing out the soup.
    Although there wasn’t a name on the picture, now it was something real. Not just a smattering of miscellaneous photos, but someone’s collection. Holding the photo in one hand, he browsed through the pages he’d already seen, comparing those pics to the loose photo. The boy wasn’t in every picture but in most of them. Jack started to recognize some of the other children, as well. Perhaps they all lived in the same orphanage. As with the loose photo, the little boy never looked into the camera. And he pretty much had the same look on his face in each one. Serious and sad.
    Well, that would make sense now, wouldn’t it? Considering what he’d just read on the back of the photo. The boy had become an orphan six months earlier. His whole world had been shattered. Not just with the loss of his parents but likely his childhood home. He had probably been relocated to a different city. Jack had read about this situation. There were hundreds and thousands of orphans in Germany after the war. In some ways, the effort to rescue them included a desire to rescue their souls.
    All of Europe had just suffered through a Second World War foisted upon mankind by the German people. Everyone agreed…everything that could be done must be done to