What is war???

 

I remember the end of WWII. I'm that old.

Everyone in my Massachusetts suburb was celebrating the end of the war. "What is war?" I asked. 

I didn't know.

I wish I still didn't.

I've lived in comfort through other wars and conflicts: wars were something to read about or watch in documentaries. They were something to be demonstrated against in the sixties.

My uncle had a NAZI knife. He came home at his wife's urging rather than serve as an Army attorney at the Nurenberg trials. 

As a bride living in Stuttgart, Germany in the sixties while my husband served his obligatory military duty in the 82nd Army Band, most of the war damage had been cleared away. There was one collapsed tower near where we lived. Decades later, visiting the location, it too had been restored.

My ex-husband was told not to wear his uniform "on the economy." 

I suspect our landlord was an old Nazi. We caught him going through our papers. It wasn't all hostile, the band, serving as a PR unit, was cheered when they played at local fests and Faschings.

Fast forward to the 70s. I was in Germany staying with my daughter's host parents. She was doing a gap year and perfecting her German.

My host, a successful businessman, told me of being a boy and how he had watched the Americans bomb Nurenberg.

When my cousins lived in Germany in the 90s, she as an Army nurse, he as a photographer, we went on one of her "forced marches" as her husband called their hikes.

Above Garmisch-Partenkirchen we came to a small chapel. Every inch of the walls was covered with photos of young men, some boys, who had been killed in WWII all from that village.

It was the first time, I realized what a price had been paid by those families too. Their pain had to be as great as the American families who lost their fathers, brothers, husbands, loved ones.

In the 90s, I worked with a French woman. Over lunch, she told me as a little girl, she'd been walking with her mother, doing errands on the streets of Evian, home of the bottled water.

"Walk faster," her mother kept telling. She was tired and dragged her feet. The Gestapo seized them. They waited for their deportation to Auschwitz when the war ended, saving them.

I helped her write her story for a project that wanted the oral histories of Jews during WWII.

In my French village, where I live parttime, there is a plaque on the wall of the music school, once the mairie. It commemorates the women who demonstrated against the Germans.

I've demonstrated against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to no avail. The offer of my flat was on a list to house Ukrainian refugees but was never taken up. 

The horror of Gaza knows no limit. Yes, it is wonderful that four hostages have been freed but over 200 Palestinians were killed in the process.

I've walked among the seemingly endless crosses at Normandy. I've stood on the peaceful beach, the ocean gently massaging the shore and imagined it filled with boats of soldiers hurtling to their deaths. I knew none of them, but I still cried.

I haven't even mentioned the wars in Africa and Asia during my lifetime.

I think of the line from the song "Where have all the flowers gone?" that ends, "When will they ever learn?" 

When will they ever learn?