This post contains pictures you will not see anywhere else on this blog.

They are arranged in the best chronological order possible, with the exception of the first image below which I like to romanticize happened the day before Solly was shipped overseas, maybe just a few days before his first letter home in the Love Solly which was written on December 26, 1944 from the deck of Solly’s transport ship to Europe.  But of course it is not December in Brooklyn in this picture;  more likely Spring-Summer 1944.

Aunt Shirley always told my mother that my dad had told her a story about the building of a very particular bridge in Germany that crossed a small river.  Shirley says he always referred to it as the one bridge which gave them more troubles and in which more of his troops died trying to complete than any other bridge they tackled.  When my mother saw these three photos she wondered whether this was that specific bridge.  There is no evidence or reason to believe this photo and Shirley’s story are part of the same narrative, only another dovetail between history and memory.