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Text: " That was the most surprising story I had ever heard. It sparked my curiosity so I went digging. I needed to know more about the life of Grandpa Mouloud. It wasn’t an easy task as most of the people from that generation had either passed away, had memory problems or were reluctant to speak to me. There were very few records and practically no books. It made me so sad that the stories of the past were slipping away like sand through my fingers. In a desperate attempt, I put posts on a few facebook groups. It was like a message in a bottle. I didn’t get any answer for months until one day I got a message from a woman I didn’t know. She was a friend of a friend. She said that had seen my post but didn’t contact me then because she had forgotten where she had seen the post so there was no way for her to contact me. My message stayed on her mind until one day, while she was talking to the friend we have in common, my story came up.

Malia, her name was Malia, reached out saying that her grandfather lived in the same street as Grandpa Mouloud when he was young before he moved to Switzerland after the independence. She said that he was a photographer and that he took thousands of photographs. She said that he kept pristine records. He was a kind of amateur archaivist. He kept dated journals and letters too.

“I am his only granddaughter,” She wrote, “I inherited all his documents. I spent hours and hours looking through the photographs he took wondering what stories hid behind the beautiful faces on the black and white paper. A few stood out. On one of them you can see a group of five young people, four men and one woman. All smiling. One of them looks like he suffered a burn on his face. Another is holding an Aoud. It was the woman who has always intrigued me. She looked like a movie star. She looked so lively and good humored and kind. It’s hard to explain. She was just shining through the page. It’s really one in a million chance that one of them is your grandpa but I mean, it’s worth a shot. Please find attached a few pictures that were taken in the old neighborhood.”

My jaw hit the floor when I opened the attachment. There he was, young Mouloud, staring back at me from across a century. He was so handsome. I was looking at a precious treasure. What other stories do the rest of the photographs hide? Stories of bravery and sacrifice, stories of beauty and friendship. I can’t help but wonder about all the long lost stories, the forgotten heroes, of our shared past. This story ends here but it’s not actually the end of the story. But that’s for another day."