May we make them proud.
I can still vividly recall Remembrance Day ceremonies from elementary school.
We would have a school assembly in the gymnasium. Every year, we would watch the same video on YouTube and bow our heads in silence at 11 a.m. for one minute.
Remembrance Day has always been a reflective day for me, and I’d like to preface this text by saying that it details lived experiences of regular people of the time of the Second World War.
Although I don’t have any connections to the First World War, my late paternal grandparents were both born and raised in Germany before and during the Second World War; my Oma, in Bremen, and my Opa, in Oberhausen.
Bremen was a big target during the war, being a major city, and Oberhausen was, and still is, a primarily industrial and coal mining city.
Both cities experienced bombings, and my late grandparents’ daily lives growing up were significantly impacted by the War. I grew up learning and hearing about snippets of their lives in that period.
It’s eerie to hear firsthand experiences about something you learn in history class. It makes it so much more real, because while this generation didn’t experience it, many of us have direct ties to those who did.
I never had the chance to ask my Oma about her adolescence during the Second World War, but my dad has told me the stories that she told him. Apparently, one Christmas, my great-grandmother had cooked a goose, and as she was taking it out of the oven to baste a final time, the Bremen air-raid alarms began to sound. Not one to waste a goose at Christmas, she ran with the cooked bird and her children to the safety of the bomb shelter around a mile away.
Frohe Weihnachten, indeed.
It’s strange how something as routine as cooking a meal was turned into a life or death situation — an unanticipated normalcy with no end in sight for that time, and even still today in conflict zones around the world.
Before he passed away last year, I was able to ask my Opa about his experiences first hand. He was very young, ten years old, when the War started.
One story he told that really stuck with me was about him and his friend. They’d gone for a walk after an all-clear, looked up, and saw some planes overhead. My Opa told his friend that the planes were English, not German. Sure enough, they were, and began releasing bombs that got closer and closer to the two boys. They began to run and the last bomb was so close that they both were tossed in the air with dirt and debris flying around them. They kept running until they reached the bunker, then sat and laughed at themselves.
When he told me this, he started chuckling, and I was speechless until he said, “After a while, you really don’t get scared anymore, but if you did, it didn’t last.”
“It was an experience I still think about sometimes,” he added, “all the bombings and everything.”
The fact that, throughout his 94 years of life, my grandfather still frequently reflected on the Second World War and was able to remember it so vividly just goes to show how the after-effects and memories of war are tenfold.
Your experiences always stick with you.
No matter which conflict, past or present, my heart goes out to those who have lost loved ones.
Let us remember them, their stories, and their legacy.
May we make them proud.
