My grandpa was among the students in the foot march

We have the pictures taken from their long trip to Kunming. The famous professor Mr. Wen, who was assasinated later in 1948, was on the pictures too, marching with the students and staff through the mountains and valleys. My grandpa was a civil engineer. He was a senior at the Tsinghua University on that year when the war broke out, at around 23 years old. Those pictures were very small, only a few inches long, apparently developed from the negatives and not being expanded. I don't know wether they're still there because the owner was long gone. Of course almost everyone shown on the pictures had passed away long ago. I think he got married a few years later and had a child born in Yibin, Szechuan on 1941. The child was my aunt. I remember he often got the mails from the alumni association with some magazines inside but never talked about this experience. The books laid on his desk all the time. The old school intellectuals like him were just so taciturn about their lives in the past due to the political repression. It's like they were silenced by the communist party's reign premanently through the many crackdowns and movements. The less you talked and kept your mouth shut, the safer you were. I never heard the old man uttering a word about himself. But the stacks of tiny pictures shot decades ago and carefully preserved tell stories. It's like his soul was folded up and kept inside there, however difficult the times were.