"Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne..."
It's Day 6 of tell Phnee what to write about, and once again sorceror's prompt takes the limelight. Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, so he asked me to talk about that.
"La guerre n'est pas une aventure. La guerre est une maladie."
--Antoine de Saint Exupéry
World War II is part of living memory in my family. My mother was eight years old when the war ended, and she still has vivid memories of those last few years of conflict, when she and her family were still living in Romania. When I was younger she used to tell me stories of one of the grooms (my mother's family were very wealthy at the time and had a butler and grooms and kitchen staff) who went to war and died during the battle of Stalingrad.
My parents introduced me to that period in history, not surprisingly, with poetry. The first three lines of the first stanza of this poem were broadcast on June 1st, 1944, as a pre-arranged signal from the BBC to the French Resistance that Operation Overlord was to begin. The next three lines "Blessent mon coeur d'une languor monotone" were broadcast on June 5th, 1944, signalling that D-Day would start within 48 hours.
My early exposure to history and to the World Wars in particular was always through literature and poetry. sorceror has asked me to talk about World War I at a later date, so expect a much longer post on that subject from me this month as well. Somehow, the literature and the poetry has always made the two World Wars feel more real to me than learning the dates and all the various numbers associated with historical events. The poetry in particular told me that there were real people there, people with hopes and dreams, people who laughed and missed their loved ones while they were at the front, who had petty rivalries and in-jokes, who shared cigarettes and exchanged pictures of their girlfriends and had water-stained notebooks in which they hastily scribbled down words that could never quite encompass all of the horrors they endured.
I sometimes wonder if presenting the stories to kids first might not spark their interest more than simply learning dates by rote. Certainly very few of my classmates or my peers ever showed much interest in history in general, with the exception of my good friends. A few years ago I was at work on June 6th, and I turned to my co-worker (a woman who was one year older than I) and said: "Oh, it's the anniversary of D-Day!" Whereupon she gave me a completely blank look. When I explained what it was, she laughed and told me she always hated history.
Now, history has never been my favourite subject in school (I always saved that spot for my literature and language classes), but I've never quite been able to wrap my mind around the notion that anyone could find it in themselves to hate history. And yet, I hear it over and over. "Oh, history is so boring!" "I always hated history." "Oh, I skipped all my history classes in high school."
I supposed I could go on a long rant about how history is vitally important and informs all the social and political events happening today, but I suspect I'd be preaching to the choir.
Suffice it to say that it was primarily the stories-both real and fictional-of the War that got me interested to begin with. I learned about my mother's household early on: the groom who died at Stalingrad, their own terrified flight from Romania in the middle of the night right after the war with nothing but the clothes on their backs and my mother's tiny stuffed toy bears which got left behind on the train, to her eternal regret.
I think that part of my outrage at people who dismiss history as "boring" stems from the fact that these stories are not only personal, for me they're also current. As I said, it's a living memory in our household. Many of the veterans of that war have passed on by now, but their children who were alive at the time are still here today. They are our parents and sometimes our grandparents. They remember Europe during and after the War. They were there to help rebuild when everything was reduced to rubble. Those horrific images of the Holocaust? Many of them witnessed those things first-hand, or were part of those images.
So I think that's why I want to shake the people who "don't like" history. Go ahead and tell my mother that you don't know about the liberation of Europe because you found it boring. Go ahead and tell her that you didn't pay attention in class when they spoke those lines of poetry aloud, while 70 years ago hundreds and thousands of people huddled by their radios waiting for the words that would tell them that their long ordeal was finally coming to an end. I'm not sure how anyone, faced with a person who has lived and breathed this history, could still open their mouth and have the words "it's boring" come out.
I think my vote will be for teaching the stories in school before we start teaching the dates. Even when all of today's voices can no longer speak for themselves, their stories will live on, and that's what's most important, in the end.
"La guerre n'est pas une aventure. La guerre est une maladie."
--Antoine de Saint Exupéry
World War II is part of living memory in my family. My mother was eight years old when the war ended, and she still has vivid memories of those last few years of conflict, when she and her family were still living in Romania. When I was younger she used to tell me stories of one of the grooms (my mother's family were very wealthy at the time and had a butler and grooms and kitchen staff) who went to war and died during the battle of Stalingrad.
My parents introduced me to that period in history, not surprisingly, with poetry. The first three lines of the first stanza of this poem were broadcast on June 1st, 1944, as a pre-arranged signal from the BBC to the French Resistance that Operation Overlord was to begin. The next three lines "Blessent mon coeur d'une languor monotone" were broadcast on June 5th, 1944, signalling that D-Day would start within 48 hours.
My early exposure to history and to the World Wars in particular was always through literature and poetry. sorceror has asked me to talk about World War I at a later date, so expect a much longer post on that subject from me this month as well. Somehow, the literature and the poetry has always made the two World Wars feel more real to me than learning the dates and all the various numbers associated with historical events. The poetry in particular told me that there were real people there, people with hopes and dreams, people who laughed and missed their loved ones while they were at the front, who had petty rivalries and in-jokes, who shared cigarettes and exchanged pictures of their girlfriends and had water-stained notebooks in which they hastily scribbled down words that could never quite encompass all of the horrors they endured.
I sometimes wonder if presenting the stories to kids first might not spark their interest more than simply learning dates by rote. Certainly very few of my classmates or my peers ever showed much interest in history in general, with the exception of my good friends. A few years ago I was at work on June 6th, and I turned to my co-worker (a woman who was one year older than I) and said: "Oh, it's the anniversary of D-Day!" Whereupon she gave me a completely blank look. When I explained what it was, she laughed and told me she always hated history.
Now, history has never been my favourite subject in school (I always saved that spot for my literature and language classes), but I've never quite been able to wrap my mind around the notion that anyone could find it in themselves to hate history. And yet, I hear it over and over. "Oh, history is so boring!" "I always hated history." "Oh, I skipped all my history classes in high school."
I supposed I could go on a long rant about how history is vitally important and informs all the social and political events happening today, but I suspect I'd be preaching to the choir.
Suffice it to say that it was primarily the stories-both real and fictional-of the War that got me interested to begin with. I learned about my mother's household early on: the groom who died at Stalingrad, their own terrified flight from Romania in the middle of the night right after the war with nothing but the clothes on their backs and my mother's tiny stuffed toy bears which got left behind on the train, to her eternal regret.
I think that part of my outrage at people who dismiss history as "boring" stems from the fact that these stories are not only personal, for me they're also current. As I said, it's a living memory in our household. Many of the veterans of that war have passed on by now, but their children who were alive at the time are still here today. They are our parents and sometimes our grandparents. They remember Europe during and after the War. They were there to help rebuild when everything was reduced to rubble. Those horrific images of the Holocaust? Many of them witnessed those things first-hand, or were part of those images.
So I think that's why I want to shake the people who "don't like" history. Go ahead and tell my mother that you don't know about the liberation of Europe because you found it boring. Go ahead and tell her that you didn't pay attention in class when they spoke those lines of poetry aloud, while 70 years ago hundreds and thousands of people huddled by their radios waiting for the words that would tell them that their long ordeal was finally coming to an end. I'm not sure how anyone, faced with a person who has lived and breathed this history, could still open their mouth and have the words "it's boring" come out.
I think my vote will be for teaching the stories in school before we start teaching the dates. Even when all of today's voices can no longer speak for themselves, their stories will live on, and that's what's most important, in the end.