Hungry

How do you know when you’ve been out of school too long? When you go to the library and return with six volumes on World War II. Yes, I’m hungry for learning. But this is the really fun kind of learning. The kind where I get to choose the topic and go as in-depth with it as I please.

So far, my eyes are really opening up to the War. In school, I merely learned the reasons for it and the battles and the tragedies, but now I’m seeing the war through the eyes of the soldiers and the nurses and even the children. Seeing it through the eyes of children is especially powerful (from Through the Eyes of Innocents). They don’t necessarily understand the big picture. They just know that they hide in the shelter until the bombs stop dropping, and then they can run outside and fight for the biggest piece of shrapnel. It became a game, a way of life.

But what I find most interesting is when children in German-occupied countries talk of the German soldiers who are now living with them. After a bombing, a little boy ventured into the streets and saw a church completely destroyed, except for the organ. A German soldier sat at the keys and played a beautiful song that echoed down the war-torn streets. “Surely this man couldn’t be all bad,” the boy reasoned. Another child talked of how a German soldier came to have tea and dinner with her family on a regular basis. He’d joke and talk of his home and show pictures of his wife and family. It’s so strange to be reminded that the Germans were human too, that they loved and laughed, and that they truly believed they were doing the right thing.

I am also a bit humbled by these accounts, because I am so quick to condemn the whole country for what they did to the Jews. How could they not have known? I ask myself. But then, when I learn that their news broadcasts were severely censored and that if they were caught listening to other news sources, like BBC, they would be sent to labor and concentration camps, I feel more compassion for the people. They were ruled by fear, and I shouldn’t judge them for it. And when I learn that 12% of their population was killed during this war, most of them soldiers but many of them civilians, I understand the true meaning of tragedy.