Rina went on. “When the boy vandalized the shul, he left old black-and-white photographs. Apparently, he had lots of photographs—bad photographs of dead bodies. But they looked different than the ones I’ve seen before.”

Oscar waited.

“We’ve all seen the piles…” Rina had to turn her head. It was painful to look in the old man’s eyes. “These were all individual pictures—of Jewish men and Jewish boys.” She felt her throat clog. “Very focused, very clear. That’s what made them so awful to look at.”

Oscar was silent.

Rina was supposed to ask if he would look at them. But she couldn’t get the words out. “I don’t know.” She squeezed his hand. “I should be going.”

“You want that I look at them.”

“No…no, you shouldn’t.”

“These pictures…the bodies…they are naked?”

Rina thought a moment. “Some are, some aren’t.”

Something shone in Oscar’s eyes. “Let me see that picture again—of the old man and the young boys.”

Rina gave him the snapshot. This time Oscar studied it for a very long time. “This boy…” He pointed a crooked finger at Karl Golding. “I know him.”

Rina was puzzled. “Oscar, he’s not the one who died.”

“I didn’t say he was. I said…I know him.”

“How?”

He wagged his finger at her as he thought. “These pictures left behind. No piles, right? It was one body in a picture.”

“Yes, exactly. What?”

“This boy…” Again the finger wagged. “If you give him…four, five years. Maybe, just maybe, he is the boy with the camera. The Polish boy. About…sixteen. Not a village boy, a city boy.”

Rina was stunned. But, of course, that made total sense. If Oscar were to remember anybody, it wouldn’t be the face of an old man who called himself Yitzchak Golding; it would be a young face that had been etched in Oscar’s mind some sixty years ago. “You remember a boy with a camera?”

“Yes, there was a boy with a camera. He takes pictures maybe one week before the camp burns down.”

Rina pointed to Karl. “He looked like this boy.”

Oscar nodded.

“Not this boy.” She showed him Ernesto.

“No, this one.” Again he had pointed to Karl.

Rina said, “A Polish boy. Who was he?”

Oscar shrugged. “A boy with a camera. So I think he had money. I think his father was big in the Polnische Polizei.”

The Polish police. Rina nodded. “Can you tell me anything else about him?”

Again the finger started wagging. “He took pictures through the fence…It was electrified, the fence. If you tried to escape…” He loudly clapped his hands. “Like a mosquito on a lamppost. You could hear them frying…smell it.” He covered his mouth, then dropped his hands. “So he didn’t touch the fence. You have the black-and-white bad pictures.”

Rina nodded.

“Show me one.”