Forgetting History

World War II is fading from people’s memory as surely as its veterans are fading from the scene. That fact seems particularly odd to those of my generation. We boomers grew up in the shadow of that war. Most of our fathers served in it. The years of our childhood and youth were commonly called the post-war era. The books, movies, TV shows, and comics we read and saw were full of stories from the war. Even as children we understood that it had been a life changing event for our parents, and as we grew older we learned what it meant for the life of the country and the history of the world. Now we see generations of Americans to whom the Second World War is apparently as remote and dimly understood as the war with Spain in 1898. It’s strange and sad and I think wrong that the awareness and understanding are fading so much and so quickly.
I thought of this today when I noticed the absence of notice in the media of the fact that this is the 70th anniversary of one of the most important events of World War II – the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the start of the war on the eastern front in Europe. The four years of battles that followed that invasion were among the bloodiest and most brutal in history, and their ultimate outcome did much to determine the course of the war and the shape of the post-war world. The crimes and atrocities committed in eastern Europe by the Nazis until they were defeated in 1945 and by the Soviets until the collapse of their empire almost fifty years later were among the most horrible in history. It’s not an anniversary or a story we should be forgetting.