So, there I am, digging deep into the Library of Congress online photo archives, searching for some specific WWII images I want to use in my currently-in-progress video, and I come to the concentration-camp pictures. I hesitate; I'm vaguely aware that my heart rate has gone up. I take a deep breath.

Even though I can look at the worst crime scene photos without batting an eye, I have an over-the-top reaction to Holocaust pictures. Many years ago, I taped "Schindler's List" off cable while I slept, and in the morning I took the tape out of the VCR, labeled it, put it back in its box, and slid it onto the shelf. I knew when I taped it that I wasn't ready to watch it, and I didn't know when I would be ready. I thought perhaps six months, maybe a year.

That tape sat on the shelf for ten years before I finally watched it.

No doubt my uncontrollably visceral reaction to Holocaust images has much to do with the fact that when I was in the third grade (third grade! eight years old!) they had us watch that torturous footage taken after the liberation of the camps -- that grainy, black and white film of the bones in the ovens, the decaying corpses being carried by the defeated captors to the mass graves, the bodies of would-be escapees left hanging on the barbed-wire fences right where they had been shot, frozen in the exact moment of death.

But I have a job to do, and that's more important than my gut reaction. So I swallow, grit my teeth, pour a glass of wine, and dig in.

And there are the all-too-familiar photos of the gaunt, emaciated Jews with barely enough strength to look up from their packed-like-sardine bunks, and there are the bones in the ovens, and...

And the real thing makes "Schindler's List" look like a Disney movie.

But those pictures I was prepared for (as best as one can be prepared to revisit one's nightmares). And then I came across this relatively innocuous-sounding link described as:

"Prisoners in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, December 19, 1938."

So I click the link, and promptly burst into tears -- partly because of what jumps right off the screen at me, and partly because the description (which I'm sure was written at the time the photo was taken) ever-so-judiciously avoids mention of the very thing that sends a sharp, stabbing pain through my chest.

Why do I want to share this with you? Because I think that you may find a use for it at some point in the future. Because it is proof that it did happen, and we are not making shit up. Because sometimes people people don't believe it happened on such a scale. Because so many are in such denial it could ever happen again. Because I'm so very angry at those who dismiss our very real fears. Because I can't sleep until I show this to someone else. Because... Just because.

But maybe I don't need to explain why. Just bookmark it for future reference, will you? I have -- and I am considering scaling it down and using it in my sig line.

Don't worry -- there are no dead bodies in this picture. But the facial expressions... Death would have been so much easier.

If you're ready, click the link:

The picture that won't let me sleep