Reflections of a WWII historian and artist

These days I find myself reflecting more than ever on people who have lived through war. 

I learn how to be a better human through their stories. 

Because of the work that I do, nothing encapsulates this on a collective level more than my work with those who lived and died during World War II. The scope of tragedy and loss is simply crushing.  

The spectrum of altruism and courage is proportionally heartsoaring. The relationship between the two is why I study this war. Maybe that’s why other historians do, too. 

I don’t really think much about types of guns and bullets, tanks, and tactics. I don’t memorize names of generals and try not to contribute to arguments such as the eternal pandora’s box of all WWII arguments: who was more evil, Hitler or Stalin. 

Generally, I try not to split war hairs.

The war was bad enough - why argue over it?

What about the lives? 

What about every heartbeat silenced in an attic, an alley, a Gestapo cell, a concentration or POW camp, or by being pierced with flying shrapnel on a battlefield or flak fragments high up in a bomber in the sky? 

Sometimes it seems, in history and in the present tense we forget or blatantly dismiss the value of individual life, or the solutions that can exist within a focus on preserving it. 

We might even attach all sorts of contingencies onto whether or not a person has value, is worth our compassion, or our assistance. 

We’d often rather ‘be right’ than consider each life with its tender tendrils of perspective and story.

We get lost in a self-righteous chest puffed out in moral indignation, about how ‘those’ people do it all wrong, while losing sight of the greater issue at hand.

It’s what humans do, and have done, all through history.  I know this because I am one. I‘m as human as it gets.

Sometimes, humans drop everything and offer their own lives, resources, and time to lift another life up. War stories are full of these stories, too.

We do this because we *feel*.

Because we understand the power that exists in connection with life itself.

Because we know that offering hope and embodying service illuminate every dark chapter in any book. 

Here’s what I know from the way my brain has wrapped itself around history’s undulations: 

Every decision we make in the name of individual or collective survival carries ripple effects that snake their way through time. 

We are all so connected. And we can choose to connect through co-creating ways to sustain life, or to destroy it.

It’s our choice. Every single moment of every single day.

The above photo is from the camera of a German soldier moving through what looks to be Eastern Europe.