From the front, Miller's reports in words and pictures, a trickle that turned into a deluge, astounded Withers and her team. She published what she felt she could. Much of it was uncompromisingly grim, and readers were equally astounded by what they read. And saw. Her adventures were hardly credible. She witnessed the siege of Saint-Malo (where napalm was first used), endured the terrible winter of the Alsace campaign, and marched the US 3rd Infantry Division to Hitler's mountain fortress as it burned. When she walked through the gates of Dachau concentration camp, she came face to face with Nazi brutality. Perhaps her steely resolve was unprepared for the horrors she witnessed: "I beg you to believe that this is true," the telegram accompanying her photographs read. Withers published, among other images, the tangled limbs of corpses stacked on top of each other.
That same evening, Miller was posted to an anonymous villa on a leafy Munich street. It turned out to be Hitler’s home. There, with Life photographer David E. Scherman, she posed for a self-portrait, angry and urgent, in the Führer’s own bathtub, scrubbing the dust and ashes of Dachau, her muddy combat boots ruining his pristine bathmat. It remains perhaps her most famous photograph. The war had made Audrey Withers. After a few difficult years, the obscure editor had triumphed, and her magazine had become a powerful, if unintended, force for good. But Miller was disoriented by the end of it. She tried to turn things around, reporting for Vogue on European reconstruction efforts. Withers begged her to return, but it was Scherman who sent her a telegram that convinced her. “Go home,” the telegram read. She eventually did, but things would never be the same again. Lee Miller never spoke publicly about her battle.
Growing up in a Reform-Atheist household, where my H&H bagel-slicing skills were considered far more important than learning my Torah portion for a bat mitzvah that I didn’t want in the first place and my parents didn’t want to pay for, I acquired most of my knowledge of the Jewish faith and traditions not in the temple, but in front of the television. The first TV rabbi I can remember appeared—like so many other good ones—on Sex and the City; I watched, fascinated, as Charlotte York tried to convert to Judaism out of love for her bald, aggressive, very Jewish boyfriend, Harry Goldenblatt, only to have the local rabbi reject her three times (which was apparently real?) before reluctantly inviting her to Shabbos dinner with his family. By Part 1 of And Just Like That… two decades later, Charlotte York-Goldenblatt has become a practicing Jewish mother with Hari Nef as her family's rabbi. (What an upgrade!)
