Nathan, thanks for the history lesson. As someone who was born over twenty
years after the war, my knowledge of these things is limited to what my
parents have told me as well as the history books in school. Unfortunately,
being an American, the history books are written and edited from the
American perspective. I did remember something about the last-stand battle
in Warsaw, but did not know the perspective.
Interesting comments about the rebuilding after the war. I've traveled to
Europe quite a bit through the years and noted the reconstruction that
continues decades later. Again, in America, our memories are shorter because
once the war was over and our men and women returned home, they immediately
settled down into the new prosperity that existed here, built new homes,
raised families and bought new cars. The war wasn't on our soil--it wasn't
our homes being bombed into oblivion. But at the same time, we lost over
400,000 men and women, but in perspective that was about 1/3 of 1% of our
population.
This compares to the horrors that occured in countries like Poland that
lost, depending on who is calculating, 6,000,000 people or over 17% of the
entire population.
This is not to say that anybody had it easy, but some of us grew up in
perfect safety, thousands of miles away from anywhere where people died and
cities destroyed. There were no bullet holes in our walls or unexploded
shells waiting for some unfortunate soul to disturb. No rationing, no
starvation, no check-points. No evidence in our lives that there ever was a
war. In 1980 I got to travel to Europe for the first time and saw the
remaining evidence, along with the thousands of headstones at our military
burial grounds. I roamed through the cemeteries at Normandy, Lorraine and
Aisne-Marne where nearly the entire unit of my Grandfather died in WW1.
Seeing the names and realizing that these men and women were just like me
with lives snuffed out.
It was no longer just something in the history books.
And then today, on this very list, we have people from all over the
world--from countries that were former enemies, different cultures,
different languages, different skin-colors, all sharing a common joy and a
common interest. I have an absolute fascination with learning about other
people and where they live or how they grew up. I shouldn't be surprised,
but it is so cool to see how much alike we all are and even as children the
games we play are the same.
And Nathan's hometown in Spain? It looks and feels almost exactly like my
own hometown area in Michigan.
AG
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