The Monuments Men and one particular legacy of WW2

[scarlettina]

Last Tuesday night, I went out with varina8 to see The Monuments Men, the new George Clooney film set toward the end of World War II about the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, created to scout and save artworks, structures and archives of cultural or historical importance from theft or destruction. The movie itself hasn't gotten very good

Comments

[garyomaha]

The older I get, the more I believe that my parents felt that their Main Mission In Life was to shield little Gary from everything and anything they could. Rather than share stories and offer teachable moments, I believe (at least from my memories) they kept all that away from me.

Unlike you, I remember learning or hearing **nothing** about the Holocaust, and very little about WWII in general, while I was young. I'll admit my interest in history back then was pretty thin. But part of it may have been due to my dad's apparent dislike of the War -- he rarely spoke of it, rarely spoke of the military, and on those occasions he mentioned the military around me, it was to make the point that I should stay as far from the military as I could. (That notion has proven, er, interesting the last 20 years of my life that I've spent around M's family, a military family living in a military suburb of Omaha.)

It's true that we weren't very Jewish, especially after my Bar Mitzvah, so perhaps there were history classes at the synagogue for teens but not for younger ones? I wonder if Omaha-Council Bluffs Jews weren't quite as immersed as New York Jews? I don't know.