Because of their provenance, these shards burned my hands for a long time. Fred and I spent hours discussing the pros and cons of creating a work with them. In the end, we felt that making Hitler real outweighed our discomfort and distaste—because Hitler and the evil he represents are real, and a continuing threat to our world. Today, historical revisionists continue to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, and “ethnic cleansing” has evolved into a not-uncommon tool of war. In this panel, I have tried to show that this was indeed a man, a man who gazed out the windows of his vacation home at the bucolic landscape, a man who had choices. And it is that very humanness that makes his legacy all the more shattering.
