A Pennsylvania-born infantryman who carried an Argus C-3 35mm camera into battle, Vaccaro set out to record the brutality of war and took thousands of photographs, from Normandy to the Elbe. After VE Day, he became a photographer for the U.S. State Department in Germany, then joined the staff of Weekend magazine (where, I’ve learned, he worked with my mother). It’s these pictures of the uneasy peace that dominate the book, as the Germans tried to dig out of their ruined lives. We see women cooking outdoors in the rubble of Nornberg in June 1945, and children stealing coal on a winter’s night in Frankfurt in 1947. That same year, an elderly gardener looks up from watering his lettuce patch to eye us icily. But real peace dawns, first through the kids who befriend the GIs and then through the young Frauleins who date the vanquishing soldiers.
Vaccaro’s book has had a strong response in Germany, where the photographer, now 79, recently wound up an eight-city tour. Hundreds of people of all ages turned out for his slide lectures and book signings, he says. “In Cologne, people had to be turned away.” After he came back to America in 1949, Vaccaro worked for Life, Look and the legendary magazine Flair. “I had trained myself in the cauldron of battle and the streets of Germany” for those later assignments, he writes in the book. But the “training” pictures from that fascinating era may be the most moving he ever took.
