WAR FOREVER

My entire early childhood was ghosted by World War II. I remember as a small boy going to Telenews with my mother in downtown Detroit, watching newsreels spin out short reels of planes dropping bombs, battleships firing guns into the air, soldiers massing for combat. Even shots of concentration camp victims and huge piles of naked skeletal bodies, the sight of which would make my mother grab me by the arm and rush us out of the theater. She said she was afraid she would see her own mother or father or sisters in one of those piles. We had learned from my uncle Milo, who had been in Auschwitz, that they had all been seized in Paris, pushed into cattle cars, sped by rail to Poland, then marched naked into fake shower chambers, and quickly gassed and cremated.