Stalingrad : behind the eyes of rival minds
This Exhibit is a tale of two men. Both equaled by the eerie surround of their silence aloud. Faces consumed by the vast expanse of snow - the pillow upon which they took their longest rests. It is a blood drenched story of war - of unspoken revenge. At the pivotal battle of Stalingrad. The battle that sealed the fate of the Third Reich. The Soviet German alliance broken too early, Hitler's denial of Rommel's military advice. Two faces tell the story through not the figures but rather human eyes. In the all too real sense of what these men saw before them. The photographs sit upon the chilling backdrop of the swastika, droplets of red brown blood are still visible on the white of the flag, but the Nazi eagle, is hardened with it. Thickened in the finality of the officer bled depleat below it, his dog tag (as the one seen above the Eagle) pierced with a Russian bayonet - finishing not only the hardened surface of a German soldier, but the soul of just a boy. Sent to the front lines - the Eastern front. In this realizing the reality of war. That soldiers on all sides were at their ends - treading upon the blood of familiar faces - bright red snow. The smell of fear has outlasted the years. However there is another story to be told. That of the Soviet soldier, A story of revenge.The man seen here was also Jewish. So long forced to fight under the alliance of Hitler and Stalin, lost among soviet ranks and hiding his identity. Condemned to watch his family murdered, his home stripped of all but memories. In this moment, Stalingrad for him was revenge. Killed in action honoring his family who succumbed in the Nazi holocaust. Both men were just young souls, captive to the mind and hand - killed defending their worlds within their own - both defending all they had ever come to know, In the names of the fellow beside and families behind. The nearly 2 million killed in perhaps history's most bloody battle. Lastly, in the exhibit you see Four SS buttons. Their weathered surface reminding of the long decayed coat and corpse – a corpse in death become neither Nazi, Soviet, or any other likeness - in dying moments proved human nonetheless.
