Beatriz Bufrahi

This is a photograph of my brother.  The picture was taken in a group home for troubled adolescents in Stuttgart, Germany in 1981. A final desperate move on behalf of my mother and the Child Welfare Agency to get Michael to finish his Hauptschulabschluss.  Michael would be gone from Sunday to Friday, spending the weekend at home. I remember my sister Angela, my mother, and I laughing hysterically about the stories he would tell at breakfast each Sunday. Silly answers people would give to their teachers, pranks they would play on each other and staff members, hilarious miscommunications between the different languages spoken by the tenants of the group home.  I am looking at the picture and can’t believe that Michael is just 17 years old at the time. He looks, strangely enough, happy and ready to do this, ready to get the certificate and move on with his life; a life that ended two years later in a car accident.