Memories of War
For the past three months, I’ve been listening to voice messages left by my 70-year old relative about the history of my father’s family. Refugees and victims of two world wars, the voices of these 3–4 generations, my ancestors, echo through my mind. Their blood runs in my veins. Maybe their fears and traumas too.
As I continue to listen to these messages with a mix of horror, compassion and gratitude, I try to separate my own feelings from these chronicles of wars and human trials. These people’s experience seems surreal, like a movie or fiction novel. Yet, I know that they’re as real as the breaths I take as I write this. It’s just hard to imagine, in the safety of my home and my current reality, that this can happen in the world. That people can do that to one another. That just a few decades ago, my grandmother’s and father’s lives were marked by bombings, famine, daily terror and gory scenes, and life-or-death on-the-spot decisions.
These close relatives are not military people or war-trained participants, nor do they have any kind of compatibility with such horrors. These are not heroes. They’re regular people: housewives, mothers, fathers who worked as carpenters or shop keepers, children who knew no safe days to play in the street or in their yard, and no quiet nights to sleep soundly, without the sound of whistling bombs or cries of pain from the wounded, or sobs of mourning from neighbors who’d lost loved ones. These are people who almost had no life of their own. They found themselves walking in the footsteps of other dead, before them, of other evacuees. They slept in the beds of those who’d left to fight or those who had died in those beds, from suicide or hunger, or a stray bullet. They breathed the air filled with smoke, with destruction and the last breaths of others.
So many died. One uncle decided to join the second world war effort, thinking that even one person can make a difference against war tanks and bombers. He died in the first battle he went into. By a random bullet. So random. Not even intended for him. Just for anyone. Fired to find anyone, indiscriminately. Because this is what wars do: they reduce the life of a single person to that one bullet. And bullets play no favorites. Neither do bombs. Not one person is more special than the next.
I listen to stories about what made these men and women who died special. Who these relatives were, the jobs they had, how many kids they had or hoped to have, people like you and I. The survivors are no less remarkable, for surviving, beyond the cruel chance, beyond the survivor’s guilt, beyond the reality of continuing to live through even more losses. These people survived and persevered for as long as they could. They found themselves refugees across countless countries, going from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, and back, during and between the two world wars. They rode ice-crusted trains out of which desperate mothers threw their frozen and famished dead babies out in the snow. Sometimes they waited for days for the trains to start again because the tracks had been destroyed by bombings. They finally got somewhere, and had to find shelter and jobs. There was famine. Mothers nursed their babies until the child’s later years so they wouldn’t die of hunger. Funeral processions passed on the street almost every day. And stories of the dead, known and unknown, filled their evenings as they huddled together to keep warm.
I started listening to these stories 3 months ago. Once the Ukraine invasion started, it became all too real again. Even to me, the child and grandchild of those war survivors, living in a safe place. The memories of my 70-year old relative were full of detail and emotion. By telling the story, she hoped that someone will remember, that someone will learn, and what others went through will remain just a grotesque period in mankind’s history because we’re no longer capable of doing this.
How can I distance myself from what I hear on the news? Who are the people now listening to bombs flying above their heads, hoping it’s not going to be their shelter they find? Who are the children and women being displaced, like my relatives were, seeking refuge elsewhere, knowing no one? Where have all the lost lives gone? And how is any of it worth it? I ask again: how is any of that worth it? How do we let it happen? How did we let it happen in Syria? 12 million refugees have been displaced there. The UNHCR estimates that over 60 million refugees and internally displaced people have not been able to return home at all over the last 22 years, due to wars and other conflicts.
People say that it’s in our nature to wage war. That no matter what we do, we’ll want to oppress and kill each other. And yet, we’ve had the atomic bomb since 1945, or earlier. That’s over 77 years of not annihilating each other. That’s over 7 decades of restraint and of negotiating conflicts without using continent or planet-destruction weapons. Other weapons have been used. But there’s a collective consensus, expressed or not, that we cannot and should not use them. We care about our own self-destruction. A planet-wide nuclear war is too much to entertain. How can we educate ourselves and love ourselves enough that any armed conflicts become too much to entertain? The human race is full of atrocious loathing and self-loathing acts of destruction. The worst comes out during wars, and the best saves us every time. There is that best in us. We have done better, we have rebuilt and repaired, forgiven and healed.
We now know, more than ever before, how damaging war is. How much destruction it brings, not just in the moment, but for years and decades after it stops. Some wounds last for centuries. We have more and more voices in activism oriented towards peaceful resolutions. How is this knowledge of what war is and does irrelevant? We cannot feign ignorance anymore. How can we turn what we’ve learned, what we know, into the means to maintain peace?
Mankind is in a position to make war unnecessary for, perhaps, the first time in history. Technology, communications, globalization, awareness, social activism on a huge scale, transcontinental trade, the diversification of currencies and a potential decentralization of power can make war obsolete. But we must move beyond our weaknesses, and balance every bad intention by remembering that the best is in us. Everything good we have in the world, we’ve created. Every comfort we have, every moral law we pass, every person’s courage to be kind and do the right thing, every intelligent innovation to improve our lives and to save our planet, and more, that’s our merit. We think the bad we do comes from us, but the good comes from the divine. The good comes from us and there’s proof all around us. Whether we prefer to think that we are just a conduit of the divine in order to do good, or we do good naturally is beside the point here. We can do good and we have. We deserve to think better of ourselves, and then do better.
War is not in our blood. But the trauma it causes is. I see the chain of generational pain reaching down to me, from all of those predecessors. And that’s only the ones from the 20th century. How many before them, in a long line of succession through the ages, passing down their own trauma to the young? Each of them trying to do better, to give more love, to survive longer. Trying to protect new life. Trying to save hope. They realized what the priorities were: family, love, survival, peace.
These are things we all treasure but too often we let others (leaders, the media, business people) tell us how much they’re worth and what we need to sacrifice for them. Or manipulate us into thinking that only we want love, peace, safety, and others want the opposite. Who are these “others” who want evil things? The more I travel, the more I realize that we’re all more or less the same.
Knowing that in spite of all we’ve learned, we still can’t do better, and our complacency is our generation’s accomplice to war and the wrecking of so many lives, of the ordinary people, but not the lives of those who order the war, how can we bear to look into the eyes of our children and not want to do better for them?
Have you heard all this before? How often have we failed at peace that these words have become a cliche? Does it feel like too much? Are wars not relevant enough or real enough for you to care? Do you care but wonder what you can do? Are you too small, indecisive or powerless?
Let’s stop here for a moment. If we’re really too small and powerless, how come a cheering crowd on a football stadium feels like a hurricane? That’s how strong we can be!
Who and what do we fight for, and who told us to do it? Who stands to gain and who stands to lose? What are the same words and acts repeated by war-hungry politicians, or shrewd businessmen, used to incite war, used to make people believe that there’s an enemy out there? We’ve seen them in the media and political life for a long time.
No country in the world has been isolated from the effects of war at one point or another in the past century. Not one that I can think of. That means that even now, families around the world, living in peaceful countries, are still carrying the trauma of war.
It’s easy to point fingers and play on people’s fears. The truth is that we’re all vulnerable and we’re all impressionable to varying degrees. The real enemy to our person, our finances, our safety and our future is often too blurry, or too big. How do we even wrap our heads against government schemes, corrupt politicians and lobbyists, big corporations, fluctuating economies, natural disasters, crumbling infrastructure, overpopulation, wacky weather, AI, basically a world off the axis it was on a century ago? How can we correctly identify the real threats to our health, finances and future when there is so much smoke and mirrors, so many layers of different truths, many backed by huge amounts of money and power? It’s so much easier for someone to point out that this specific foreign neighbor is the enemy for whatever reason, and that specific part of the world is an enemy as well. Once this happens, we finally feel like we have clear heads and are ready to pick up arms or support the war machines, rather than muddle through the very hazy reality we live in close to home. In fact, our head is no clearer than before, but our attention is directed towards specific, well-chosen targets for our fear and vulnerabilities.
Manipulated this way, even if we have the best of intentions, we may still incorrectly create an enemy out of nothing, and then perpetuate the wrong narrative. We stopped war and those operating the engines of war before. There are so many advocating for war, and I see so many advocating against war. We need more of the latter so we can build a better future. Because the best is there, in all of us, all over the world. And the only way to save our world when we can invent worse and worse weapons is by choosing cooperation and inventing new tools of making peace too.
