Edited Photograph |
Original Photograph |
The images were part of Steven’s family history project. One
image seems to show several young women, all dressed in white and holding hands
with a banner in the back. Ignatz’s history teacher noticed that the banner
seemed wrong, since “it had the YW logo on it. Well, I checked some of the History
image databases, and there was the original image, and it was a gathering of young
female Nazis,” explained Olivier.
Steven stated that he simply took the pictures from a family
history book that “his gramma spent a lot of time on” many years ago. He was just as shocked as the other students
when the pictures that he thought were his grandfather and “a whole lot of
very, very excited boy scouts” turned out to be thousands of parading young Arians
bent on world domination.
For his part, Steven’s father Emmerich was less surprised. “Of
course I didn’t think that my mother had gone so far as to change the pictures
and re-write it all, but the family’s past does not surprise me,”
explained Brother Ignatz. “I remember a very, very strange feeling of comfort and
home when I went to the MTC.” Ignatz elaborated that there “we would line up
and march into the devotionals singing ‘Called to Serve’ in our identical suits and
clean white shirts, so when I ended up watching those Leni Riefenstahl films
in my cinema history courses years later, those original enthusiastic feelings
all made sense to me!”
Emmerich, who works in his stake’s Young Men program, also
noted that “now that I know more about my family’s past, when I see all of
those blond youth at the stake dances doing those line dances in
complete unison, I feel the oddest mix of nostalgia and revulsion.” Concluded
Ignatz, “at the last dance, when I heard the guy in the song say, ‘Everybody
clap your hands,’ and saw the kids form perfect lines and move together in
mindless synchronization, I just had to go wait in the van.”
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