I was born more than a decade after the Second World War ended, but it cast such a long shadow that I did not see it as history but as part of the present.
My parents had been children during the war. A great uncle had been interned by the Japanese. We knew veterans who were still vigorous, active, if not quite young. World War II movies seemed less “historical” to me than modern action films. Even books that discussed it as part of the past tended to include its very real and concrete context in the present.
When I was twelve, I read a memoir by a woman who had endured years in a concentration camp. She talked about how some survivors did not speak of their experience, but had tell-tale physical signs resulting from it. Did any of her readers, she asked, know someone who quite suddenly would become tired and have to stop, sit down, in the midst of physical activities like a long walk or a bicycle ride? Did we know someone in their twenties who was unusually short and slender, whose head seemed slightly large in proportion to their body?
I read this in a school library in Northern Louisiana and I imagined someone in that moment, the present –1970 — a fragile, pale young woman, stopping her bicycle on some shady country road in France or Germany. She got off, still holding the handle bars. She did not actually sit down, but she bent, her eyes closed, struggling to catch her breath before going on. Modern light through modern leaves dappled her, the dusty road. She was not history. She was now, someone I might meet and come to know.
Years have passed, and I have watched that era grow smaller, its shadows receding. I’ve seen it fall more and more out of living memory and into “history,” many of its lessons forgotten. The young woman I imagined is now very, very old, if not dead.
And it’s not just that enormous watershed of a war in the midst of the last century. One of my earliest memories is watching President Kennedy’s gray washed funeral on TV, the riderless horse, his little son saluting. I was only six, but my parents made me watch it. “This is history,” they said.
In the late ’90s, that came home to me when I shocked a younger co-worker by mentioning I had gone to high school with someone who, in 1963, had actually been there, in Dallas, watching the motorcade with her parents. “That’s like knowing someone who was in Ford’s theater!” another co-worker laughed.
When I was a child, my grandfather once told me about visiting his grandparents in Chattanooga. “The first thing I would do whenever I got to their house,” he said, “was run upstairs to my grandparents’ bedroom, and look in their closet.”
The Confederate uniform his grandfather had worn when he was a fifteen-year-old runaway still hung alongside all the other clothes. “It would hit the eye right off because of its color,” my grandfather said.
He didn’t say whether he’d actually touch it or not, but I do imagine a little boy reaching up and perhaps stroking one of its sleeves, awed by history made solid, relevant.
It seemed a very strange story to me when I was little. Only later did it occur to me that, by the year I was born, a century had not yet passed since the Civil War. In 1958 I even had a very elderly living relative who, when she was a toddler, had confronted Yankee soldiers rifling the family silver and amused them by shouting at them to stop.
As the Civil War was to me, so the Second World War is to younger people. Just as distant, just as strange.
It will happen to you.
Pam Troy 