Work Text:
The little girl looked at the pictures in the national newspaper. The black and white stills captured scenes of mangled bodies, fleeing Germans, victorious Americans, and the thankful French. She furrowed her brow. The pictures scared her. Her Daddy was over there, did he see these things every day?
“Mommy I don’t like this,” She said, looking up at her mother, who had her own copy of the newspaper, also frowning at the news.
“I don’t either sweetie. But you know, if France is finally free like they say, then that means we’re one step closer to Daddy coming home.”
“Why is Mr. Baxter taking pictures of dead people?” the girl asked, looking at the photo credit: S.A. Baxter.
“I think it’s supposed to show us how scary the war can be. Too many people here like the war.”
“Well I don’t,” the girl huffed, “and I want Daddy back.”
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Susan Amelia Baxter knelt next to a pile of burned books. The Nazis had wanted to censor everything, so they destroyed what they didn’t want the French to see. Susan held her camera up to her face and focused on a lone book near the edge of the pile. The book wasn’t all she wanted her audience to see, though. There was a charred hand peeking out from beneath the ashes. The remnants of someone who had gotten a little too opinionated for the Germans’ liking. She set the book to the right of her shot, allowing the half burned, lettered pieces of paper and hollow book covers to fill up the rest of the space. The hand was among the dust, ash, and book carcasses, clearly attached to a body hidden deeper within the pile. She snapped the picture, the camera storing the piece of history inside, printed on film.
Susan stood up, eyeing her surroundings. The Germans had left a mere twenty minutes ago, and the French were beginning to emerge from their houses. Closer to the heart of the city, cheers could be heard, praising the Allies for finally freeing France. Susan hopped into her car and asked her driver to take her deeper into Paris. It was a fairly short drive through a fairly small city. In ten minutes the roar of celebration was deafening. Susan snapped a few moving shots, hoping to catch at least one or two stills with clear people.
“Arrête ici s’il vous plaît,” she told her driver. Stop here, please . She jumped out, holding the hem of her skirt up to her knees so she could more easily catch up to the action. What was happening was eerily similar to a parade, but the celebration was for much more morbid reasons. People were rushing out of their homes to see the Americans drive through the city, victorious against the Germans, the bodies in the back streets nearly forgotten, the loved ones lost cheering with them in spirit. Susan caught pictures of the greatly relieved French, the American soldiers gladly accepting the cry of thank you, and of some French youth running out to hug soldiers in the procession.
Another reporter knelt by her, getting some lower angle shots. He glared over at her, noticing her taking pictures of the same things he was.
“Broads like you shouldn’t be over here,” he sneered, “this is a man’s job.”
Susan scoffed. How was this a man’s job? Pressing a button and writing a story was something anyone with a brain could do. It baffled Susan that men always seemed to need to tell women that men were better than them. Susan just shook her head and continued trying to focus on one or two specific faces. The celebration in front of her, that was what the Americans back home needed to see. Sure, she tried to let them see that war was nothing to joke about, which was why she photographed and reported the murders, but people needed to see that they were in this for a good reason, and that they were making a difference.
She made her way back to camp to start writing about her experience that day. While walking through the camp, she was catcalled and yelled at for being a woman in a man’s place. But she didn’t care. She was used to it. She pulled out her notebook and a pen and started writing in neat cursive.
She wrote not about her struggles as a woman reporter, no, people didn’t want to read that now. She wrote about the people she had seen that day, she wrote about the grief she saw on people’s faces even with their freedom being celebrated. She wrote about the dead people she saw, the horrible things the Nazis had done to them, and the families who had lost them. She wrote about the American procession she had witnessed, and the tears of joy from the French. She wrote about the realities of war. And she wrote what people needed to see.
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“Of course I didn’t do it for the fame,” Susan replied to a young reporter who reminded her a lot of herself, “I did it because I fell in love with photography, and I knew people didn’t know enough about the war. I knew I had to tell Americans on the homefront the truth, no matter how gruesome it turned out to be. That’s why I pushed through the sexism I faced and the death I saw. Not because I sought fame, but because it was important for me to show Americans what their families were fighting for.”