On Wed, Mar 02, 2011 at 12:52:57PM -0500, Ben Okopnik wrote: > Yes, horrible things are done in war. I know all about it; my father was > in it (they dug 20 shell fragments out of him, and had to leave 2 of > them in, since they were too close to the brain for wartime surgery to > be of use), and my uncle died at the front. I'm a Russian Jew of a > generation that was directly affected by WWII; I had relatives who died > in the labor camps, I've seen the ruins of the cities - *every single > person I knew growing up* had lost someone. Try to comprehend the scope > of that. That's a bit different from reading about it in books, where > you can draw any picture you like; reality is stark and exceptionally > clear, and doesn't leave much to the imagination.
My mother's side of my family is Polish. I used to think that my oldest aunt on that side was intolerably crazy. At some point as I got older (though I don't think it was until my late teens or early 20s), I remembered that she was born in 1938, and finally put 2 and 2 together. She's still crazy, but the ways in which she's crazy make a lot more sense now (and have become tolerable as a result). I also remember, when my parents were getting divorced, that my grandmother recounted some comment that was made to her by my grandfather (who died decades before I was born). It seemed a really unusual comment to make, and I wondered why it would ever have been made until I remembered the war and my curiosity was replaced with a big, bleak, sort of terrifying "oh." I really don't think there's any virtue in war, except that some people endure more of it than they have to, in order to spare others the horror. -- Kris Coward http://unripe.melon.org/ GPG Fingerprint: 2BF3 957D 310A FEEC 4733 830E 21A4 05C7 1FEB 12B3 _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
