New Ruins

From Copetpek to Reykjavic, the hills of Lola are pockmarked by collapsed brick chimneys and fenceless gates. Here is where they died, in their hundreds of thousands. These monuments watched over the postwar period, where the craters had been filled in and decontaminated.

You were not supposed to play in the ruins because of residual radiation. That’s what they were told as kids. The truth is that the stones were next to harmless after seventy years. They did not want the kids playing there because there was no telling how many unmarked graves remained or what might rise to the surface in the rains.