During WWII, I was a young child. What the war meant to me was, we pulled the shades at night, and we didn't open the refrigerator door, in case the Germans or Japanese saw our lights and bombed us. Our dads went out on the streets with helmets, and if we were bombed, we were to get under tables. Our dads went away, and our Mothers cried a lot. I did not know the slow moving patience of the Germans and how they slowly moved across Europe in the early days. Appeasement was the philosophy of the rest of Europe, because they did not want to ruffle Hitlers feathers, or the whole problem might go away, so they did not stand up against him. Hitler methodically went right through Europe, pausing now and then, to have a cease fire and move his troops into more statigic positions.
As we grew older, we knew the names of Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill. I remember the disgust of my family for Chamberlain. Somehow Winston Churchill was a hero. Truman became a hero, when he dropped the bomb. It meant that my Dad did not have to out to sea again.
There were a lot of Hollywood movies that gave us feel good fluff, about how romantic and heroic the soldiers were. But after that, what influenced me a lot, were the pictures of skeletons of the mass graves in Germany, and the horrible reports of how many Jews were slaughtered. And, in addition, the funny thing was, at school we had something called history. You could not graduate from high school or college without taking U.S. history. And it always touched on the World War. These classes pretty much matched,more or less, what my elders said. I then made a pledge to myself,to think about the Jews, for the rest of my life. Anne Frank meant a lot to me. So when I hear that the US is acting like Hitler, in trying to take over the world, I notice that people speaking have no real understanding of history, and are usually a great deal younger, and I might add, stupider.
