VE Day 80

[julesjones]

80 years on, and the numbers of those who remember first hand are dwindling. I listened to the stories of those who were very young then, and thought of my own parents, born during the war. The effects ripple down the years, in things like the phrase "my parents were war babies" used by many in my age group to explain our dislike of food waste.

Lest we forget; for as the King reminded us in a very pointed speech this evening, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and the evidence of that is all too obvious around us.

Comments

[heleninwales]

My 102 year-old friend remembers the war. She was a young adult then and already teaching. One of the members of our Quaker meeting must almost 90 and she remembers being a child in occupied Holland. People my age (70s) remember the stories our parents told us about their experiences. But for people younger than me, there's no real direct connection any more. To them it's history, as studied at school.

[julesjones]

My niblings in their 20s have a direct connection, listening to my mother talk about her memories of being a young child during and after the war. And if they had lived in the same country as my grandmother they could have in theory listened to her stories of being a young adult during the war, as the youngest was 12 when she died. Only in theory, because I don't remember her ever talking much about it.

It did make me think about memory chains between generations. My mother also talks about her grandfather who fought in the first world war, who did not talk about it but occasionally made reference to the medical problems he had as a result - amongst other things, he was gassed. So the kids are hearing that story directly from someone who heard it directly from the source. The oldest nibling could easily have had a child of his own by now old enough to hear and understand it from my mother. Two hundred years after that war ended there could be someone alive who had heard a story from the person who listened to the person it had actually happened to - still not *quite* past the horizon of "this happened to real people that people I know knew."

[watervole]

Authoritarianism is gaining control in far too many places.