Zelda responds:
Jan 29, 2003 Read/heard/seen
In response to my including her entry on here, Zelda wrote: I think I was in error in the paragraphs you quoted. There was a great deal of political and persecution activity before the Bosnia/Serbia conflict and there was also a long war with the Russians a few years earlier.
So war was not sudden for the people. Please clarify me if I’m wrong. To survive, the peopled bartered their belongings. My brother visited Bosnia a couple of itmes and I remember the photos he took of the open air bartering marketplace.
The school teachers didn’t receive their pay from the government for a loonnng time, so people had to think cooperatively in order to pay their rent.
My response is that what I think she very importantly made clear was that war happens to ordinary people. People like us. When we think about war, we tend to think about it happening to other people. That it happens somewhere else to someone else and that unless we happen to be in the armed forces, it doesn’t happen to us. For most of us, war is historical or it’s something that happens far away and we only think about it in theory. But we aren’t safe just because we’re here in the United States.
Many, many Jews in German and Austria and Poland heard about the concentration camps. Rumors were rife. More people didn’t flee because they thought, “It can’t be true. Something that horrible and inhumane could never happen.” But it did and it does and it will.
When I read history, I’m always struck by how ordinary peoples’ lives were before history happened to them. In an abstract way, I find it comforting to know that we are part of a grand, undulating story and that because we’re in the middle of one great event or another, we’re fearful but that there is a pattern that stretches beyond us as individuals. I hate to get all new-age gushy-wushy on you, but I trust that beyond this — this planet, this plane of being — there is something else and that our souls/spirits/life-force will continue. It doesn’t make it ok, mind you, that people (children!) suffer and die horrible deaths but it comforts me to think that there is safety outside of that suffering. My concern is still with what happens here and now because I think that’s my duty as a moral person living here and now but I hope (believe) that there is release.
On the other hand, when I read about those ordinary people being shoved into railroad cars or watching their children burn, I am horrified to realize that no one is safe and that living here in the United States doesn’t protect us from atrocities. I want my son to be safe and I get very, very scared when I realize that his protection may be out of my hands.
Anyway, that’s what I got from Zelda’s entry.
January 29th, 2003 at 12:56 pm
Wow, that’s beautiful. You are so right. I’ve updated that entry in my weblog again.
http://zeldaanslinger.blogspot.com/2003_01_01_zeldaanslinger_archive.html#88116538
January 29th, 2003 at 3:13 pm
I don’t think that the fact that war happens to everyday people-people like me- really hit home for me until I read Noel Streatfeld’s autobiography last year. When the war started in England, it was such a foreign notion to her and the people around her that they couldn’t believe it would really happen. But the war ended up taking at least one close relative and many years of her life. She also lost one book entirely because of a warehouse bombing.
January 30th, 2003 at 4:16 pm
The UK humanitarian organization OxFam has evaluated the status of people’s lives in Iraq (even before another military action there) and they’re not very well off.
Clean water & sewage disposal is lacking, infant mortality is high, they just had a drought, and a lot of people rely upon donated food rations. More war there would be devastating.
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/whatnew/iraq/iraq28jan03.html