“Monsieur, what is the nearest place where I might find work?”

The director turned back and smirked a little, tipping his head and stroking at his red beard. He walked back to Javert and pulled some more coins from his pocket.

“You ask me about work? Then your years here must have been for something, eh? Yes, my boy. You should work. Do not be like the wretched little beasts who run about picking pockets.”

He handed Javert three shining silver coins that had the rather ugly profile of a man upon them. 

She sighed and stared at the ten dollar bill sitting on her boudoir. She’d never given it to the meat packers who had moved her trunk. Instead, she’d given them the two dollars each they’d been promised, and she’d kept the ten dollars from Nick with the intention of giving it back to him tonight. But it had been burning a hole in her little purse ever since he’d given it to her. She could buy a new dress or new shoes with that money, she thought. She could buy a new hat. Alice sighed and shoved the ten dollar bill further away, toward her little jar of mascara, and she began to sing quietly, her voice scratching,

“Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don’t love nobody but me.”

Occasionally, witnesses will give testimony that is so far beyond the boundaries of believability that it is dismissed outright. In the case of the Holocaust, many suvivors’ testimonies were considered too outrageous to be believed. Nothing on the scope and scale of the Holocaust had a place in historical research. It was a genocide more neatly and completely organised than anything that occurred before or since. Unlike in criminal cases where the witness makes histrionic assertions, Holocaust survivor testimony was often affirmed by defence accounts, photographs, documents, bystander testimony, and other sources of information on this unprecedented and ghastly phenomenon.

Hawkeye in M*A*S*H said it best: “War isn’t Hell. War is war and Hell is Hell… There are no innocent bystanders in Hell, but war is chock full of them.”