Mireille Juchau

Josie had always felt that pictured baby had nothing to do with her. So it was stranger still when she recognised her self more clearly in her aunt’s oil paintings. How could a painting be truer than a photo? Kate had captured some invisible element of air, like the petrol shimmer round her father’s shadow when he refilled the car.

Even as I uncover materials that suggest Renate’s appearance – a portrait of her sister on an East Berlin balcony in 1961, prisoner records from age sixteen till liberation, a Hollerith card that catalogues her physical features – she remains stubbornly abstract, a dream that can’t be retrieved.