White Picket Fences by Susan Meissner Page B

talking about the war. About Treblinka. The man might say no. Chase sensed a tiny part of himself hoped he would say no. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know what it had been like at the concentration camp. “Mr. Bliss…”
    “Josef.”
    “Josef, I have a favor to ask. My friend and my cousin and I have a sociology project to do for school. We’re thinking of making a video documentary and basing it on the Holocaust. We were… we were wondering if you and Eliasz would share with us what you went through during the war.”
    “So at last we will talk about this, eh, Chase?”
    “What?”
    “I was beginning to think you were never going to ask.”
    “I…I was waiting for you to bring it up.”
    “Why?”
    Chase opened his mouth and then shut it. He didn’t really know.
    Josef tipped his head. “Come anytime. Bring your friends. Bring your camera. I have been waiting.”

thirteen
    O kay so here’s how I see it.” Matt lay on Chase’s unmade bed with the one-page criteria for the sociology project lying across his lap. It was wrinkled and dog eared and stained with a splatter of Mountain Dew. “We can maybe open with some stills off the Internet. You know, pictures from concentration camps fading in and out, with our own commentary providing the prologue. Then we bring in pictures of Josef and Eliasz. And then we add their voices. And we can ask them questions, but not have it be part of the audio. Have it be a text image, white on black. We can add in stills of your great-grandfather as they’re talking.”
    Chase leaned against his computer desk, arms folded across his chest. Tally sat on the floor by his feet, stroking the Janviers’ snoozing cocker spaniel. He was about to tell Matt he had seen too many mediocre documentaries when Matt continued.
    “Then we just let these guys go to town. I bet they can talk for hours about this stuff. So we just let them talk. We’ll probably have a couple hours of footage for a fifteen-minute video, and the hardest part about the project will be trimming the content, not coming up with it. It will be a piece of cake.”
    Tally kept her eyes on the dog. “I really don’t think this project will feel like it’s a piece of cake.”
    “Okay. Bad word choice. But you know what I mean. It’s not going to take hours and hours of our time. And I’m telling you, I’ve got two AP courses that are killing me. And a job and soccer practice. This will work out great.”
    “I don’t want to use stills off the Internet,” Chase said.
    Matt sat up. “Why not? People do it all the time.”
    “I don’t.”
    “Hey, even the History Channel uses other people’s stuff.”
    “From museums and private collections maybe, but they don’t go trawling the Internet for pictures.”
    “Chase…,” Matt began.
    “Besides, that intro has been done to death. Old pictures fading in and out, dissolving to an old guy in a wheelchair, remembering.”
    Matt swung his legs around. “That’s because it works. That intro works.”
    “I don’t settle for what works; I want what makes an impression.” Chase looked down at his cousin. Tally’s hand still rested on the dog’s back, but she was looking at him.
    “I suppose you have a better idea for an intro?” Matt asked. “And no weird film-noir crap, either. This thing has to have a point any ten-year-old would get.”
    “Of course I have a better idea.”
    “Let’s hear it, then.”
    It had taken only a few moments of speculation to come up with an idea for the opening of their video. The idea came to him when he saw Tally looking longingly at the answering machine when they got home from school. She’d hoped it would beblinking. Without a word he knew she was hoping to hear from Bart. But there was no message.
    “We open with nothing but violin, high and ethereal, like we’re in somebody’s dream,” Chase began. “Then we fade to a man walking through a cemetery. We don’t see the man’s face, just his feet. We