Amid So Much Change, What Is Fixed?
History in Germany, Russia, and Ukraine
I remember watching a documentary about World War 2 years ago. It had a lot of interviews with people who’d fought in the war, but the one that sticks in my memory was with an old Russian man whose company had fought westward into German-occupied Poland during the bitter cold of the Polish winter. That’s when they discovered the camps. Most people, I think, assume that the nightmarish conditions at the work camps and death camps were one of the motivations for fighting the Germans — that the Europeans and Americans and Russians knew about the nightmare conditions there, and set out to liberate them. But that’s not the case. The camps were discovered. And this old Russian man was among the first soldiers to stumble across the hellscape of the camps, which had almost always been abandoned by the Nazi staff prior to the arrival of liberating armies.
The old Russian soldier described the scene, but I don’t remember what he said he saw. I remember what he said he felt. My own memory has probably poeticized it, but it feels like I remember his words exactly.
We wept there, in the snow. Grown men weeping. We were exhausted, and hungry, and cold. But our tears lit within us a fire. A fire to pursue them; to hunt them down and send them to hell.
This morning I listened to the New York Time’s podcast The Daily, as I do most days. In it, they interviewed a Ukranian woman who was fleeing her country with her two grandchildren in tow, fleeing the Russian army, probably headed into Poland.
She said that she kept thinking of her own grandmother, who had told her the story of fleeing her home. That time it was the Germans she was fleeing, with her own **two small grandchildren clutched tightly to her as the bullets flew.
The German army was effectively dissolved in 1946, after they lost the war. It remained effectively nonexistent for almost a decade, until 1955 when it established the bare-bones military that it’s maintained ever since.
Until today, that is.
Yesterday, Germany’s military budget was 1.5% of GDP.
Today Germany announced it was immediately adding a hundred-billion Euros to that budget, and that it would increase its defense budget by more than 2% of GDP every year for the foreseeable future.
But those are just percentages and currencies and economic concepts: so many percentage points, the Euro, Gross Domestic Products.
What I wanted to point out is this: That in one generation a woman clutches her grand-babies and flees toward safety in Russia, as German army bullets whiz through the air, announcing the arrival of the army that had crushed Poland and littered its countryside with silos of corpses. One of those grand-children grows up, and today she’s clutching her own grand-babies, as she flees the Russian invasion, into a Poland that is free and independent, but that’s flirting with a populism that a post-Nazi Germany has warned them against. Meanwhile Germany is amping up its military so it can help its neighbors fend off an invasion from an army of the grandchildren of the people who helped liberate the world from the German takeover.
If in a single lifetime all of these things can change, what is fixed?
