A unique feature about long-lost family photographs dredged up painful memories for some readers last week.
The principal of an Etobicoke school had asked The Star to find the family shown in a set of old photographs. Someone found the pictures five years ago outside the school and he felt they should be returned to their owners.
Rewrite chief Nicolaas van Rijn wrote a feature speculating on the lives of the “storybook” family.
It ran over three pages and included 30 of 47 photographs of the German family over several years, some taken during Nazi Germany in World War II. Six of the shots showed the father, Erich, in a wehrmacht uniform, from Hitler’s wartime land army. One showed him in the vicinity of a swastika banner.
Some readers were upset by the tone and content of the feature.
“My family got out in time,” said reader Helen Breslauer, of Toronto, who is originally from Germany. Her family was more fortunate than thousands of other Jewish people, she said, who have “no family pictures whatsoever, let alone an album, because the Nazis killed everyone.”
Another reader was upset because no one knew when the story ran if the soldier had participated in wartime atrocities.
Bernie Farber, of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said The Star should have been more sensitive to the feelings of Holocaust survivors. Farber’s father was left with only two family photos after the Holocaust and cherished them until his death.
Simply put, he said: “it was not a news piece and did not have to run.”
Still other readers, like Gary Lentz, contacted the paper eager to help solve the mystery, offering tips that led to Van Rijn’s story today in the Greater Toronto section filling in the blanks. Lentz found the piece “interesting” and thought it was a “shame” that the photos were unclaimed.
Despite the tone of Van Rijn’s first story, he did not ignore the soldier’s military past. In fact, he described the uniform “decorated with swastika, Iron Cross and combat badge.”
“How did he earn them? Where? What did he do? To whom?” Van Rijn wrote.
The photos, Van Rijn said, told a compelling story and created a mystery he felt obliged to solve. His own family suffered in German-occupied Holland during the war.
“The focus of the piece was the photos, how they came to be where they were found and who were these people, not the soldier. He was part – a big part, yes – of the story but by no means the whole story. It has been 55 years. Can’t we look at this as a piece of history?”
Vince Carlin, chair of the journalism school at Ryerson University, said journalists must not be afraid to explore such difficult issues, even though they are offensive to some people. He would have run the story. But he found the “lyrical tone” of the piece “off-putting and naive.”
He would have edited the package to include “more historical context.”
City editor Jonathan Ferguson said great care was taken with the piece.
“We were conscious that the images of the German soldier during the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi era would likely trigger horrible memories with some readers.
“But to have ignored those pictures from the 47 we had to choose from would have amounted to editing history. We opted not to do so.”
Perhaps the written reflection through the historical window could have been darker. Now the puzzle has been solved, readers can draw their conclusions in context.
