I grew up in London and remember the war very well with all the houses around ours bombed on the Lutwaffe’s nightly bombing runs to the Handley Page Aircraft Factory nearby.
As a child I went to school under police escort to get through the gauntlet of gangs of boys in wait for a Christ-killer!
At night I dreamed of being on one of those trains, locked in and at the mercy of those who hate us.
I have ridden those rails thousands of times with so many stories and terrified glances through crack in the locked doors and boards in the rail cars, trying to plan an escape!
Nothing is more evocative than the branch in the rails that led to the gas chambers.
But I also think of the Irish children climbing rocks to place dynamite charges to build the USA railways. I replay movies in my mind of the mass cruelty to Chinese laborors in those railways too.
So rails have become symbolic of challenges of conscience to use of power for either good or evil!
It’s never more important than today, when Russia is said by Trump to be “compromising” if it ceases taking even more land and kidnapped Ukrainian children to become Russians ….in return for swathes of mineral-rich and population-dense Ukrainian land it has as yet failed to occupy, despite throwing away a million Russian soldiers livers, wounded or dead in the process!
We need to understand the difference between left and right turns in a world of exploitation of the powerless.
Chris’ Platinum print of his colleague,
Glen Thaxton‘s photo carries all this in those flashes of history in the marvelously presented: iconically harrowing railway lines where power alone can decide the fate of millions!
Asher
