My mom and I were having a conversation this year about the Second World War.
My mother and father were teenagers in occupied Holland. She still covers her ears and is frightened in a thunderstorm as it brings back memories. She had to evacuate a train strafed by German fighter planes, her brother died in a prisoner of war camp in Indonesia, and her father died due to the stress of being a locomotive engineer.
She witnessed the roundups of Jews and others who the Germans were intent on capturing and my parents knew what hunger felt like.
Yet there were bright spots.
“We were closer,” she said. “People showed their best in times like those. It made you feel good when those times happened.”
We are probably going through another world upheaval which may or may not culminate in a war, if not, there are plenty of people feeling hardships now.
However, it must be the same for them as it was for my parents, I would think.
It’s not all bad.
