The Undaunted

The Editor in Chief

Jack held out his hand, frowning. "As far as I know, Gene Atkinson is still our stringer. But he doesn't send pictures." He glanced down at the sheet of paper in front of him, expecting it was a mistake, that the cable operator had entered the wrong number and he was about to read a dispatch meant for the New York Post or the New York Times. But the page clearly stated both his name and the name of his newspaper. His frown deepened as he read the piece.

"This is good," he said to Alice. "Gene is always too concerned with everyone's name, rank and serial number to get with a story is all about. Who did you say it's from?"

Alice consulted her notepad. "Someone named Victor de Rêve. Do you know him?"

Jack shook his head. "Never heard of him."

Jack reread the page in front of him. Monsieur de Rêve was well informed and had thought to speak to the spectators, the people who filed into the courts at Nuremberg to watch the trials, had thought to ask them why they were there, for whom they mourned, and whether any kind of retribution would be enough. There was even a direct quote from one of the Nazis on trial. He was a lesser personage than Goering or Hess for sure, but still. A quote from one of those monsters to be tried was gold.

"Can you get Gene on the line?" he said to Alice. "I need to find out what the hell's going on."

"Sure thing." Alice disappeared and, by some miracle, it only took her half an hour to locate their stringer.

She put him through, and Jack didn't waste words. "Gene. Why the hell am I getting high quality stories from a Monsieur de Rêve with quotes from former Nazi officials, when I haven't seen a damn thing from you all day?"

Jack listened without sympathy to his stringer's tale of a broken leg from a drunken jeep accident which would put him out of action for at least a month. "I survived an entire war without a drunken jeep accident," he said curtly to Gene. "Someone who can't survive a couple of months in a hotel room covering a trial isn't someone I need on my service. You can make it up to me by finding out who this Monsieur de Rêve is, and I'll give you a solid reference that'll get you another job."

After he'd hung up the phone, Alice knocked again. "The pictures just came in on the wire. You'll want to take a look at these."

She was right. The pictures hadn't been taken by a hack; they were the work of an artist. An artist who hadn't wanted to send film, but prints. The photographer had caught American Judge Francis Biddle with his head turned toward a man before him, one Otto Ohlendorf, who was admitting to having presided over the murder of 90,000 Jewish people. But the judge's eyes were not fixed on the man. Instead, they were turned unknowingly toward the camera, and they shone with staunched tears as Ohlendorf spoke dispassionately about his concern for the welfare of those who had administered the killings.

Where is your concern for all those who died?  the image seemed to say, through the suddenly unshielded, sorrowful face of the judge.

The next photograph was of Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a member of the French Resistance, who had somehow survived both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück and was the first survivor to tell her story to the court. Again, the photographer had caught the judge with the same damp eyes, but this time they were fixed on the woman before him, honoring her by refusing to look away no matter how affecting her words were.

Jack let out a breath. "Get everybody into the conference room right now, Alice, to finalize the news budget. This is going on the front page tomorrow."

***
"That's some Pulitzer-grade reporting you've got on your front cover this morning," Edward Delaney said to his grandson as they drank their coffee and ate their breakfast with all of the morning newspapers spread out before them.