70 years had passed since the last shot was fired at Stalingrad in Feb. 1943 and we here, in the 21st Century do not even notice. It had become a "Russian Issue'. They still write about it, debate if the city should be renamed back into Stalingrad, discuss, argue, even make movies. Germans do not seem to discuss this at all. Nor do the former Allies. The former German- occupied countries- those try not to mention it. In Ukraine now they talk more about some mystical victories of Mazepa in the 18th century than about Stalingrad. And in Germany some scholars now say that Ukraine is on the way to democracy.
In Poland they know everything about the Khatyn incident with Polish officers but nobody will tell you about Polish cooperation with Germans or how Stalingrad encouraged the Warsaw ghetto uprising in the same year (with tragic results). In the Baltics the former SS organizations are called now heroes of liberation struggle.
To make the situation worse we here are upset at Russia forbidding the adoption of its children by American families. Those Ruskies really are pesky. Who cares for Stalingrad?
I guess eventually the big battles of the past, the ones which were the turning points of history, the ones which were at those times seen as transcending through ages, like Troy, Cannes, Karres, Katalayun Fields, Hastings, Las- Navas- de Tolosa, Bezier, Lepanto, Orleans, Leiden, Poltava, Quebec, Valmi, Borodino, Waterloo, Sevastopol, Gettysburg, Sedan, Tzusima, Verdun, Saloniki, Crimea, Madrid, Westerplatte, El- Alamein, Moscow, Stalingrad, Normandy, Balaton, Guam, Bataan, Berlin, Dien- Bien -- Fu, etc.- they all had become a matter of an individual consideration. In the silence of one's own home a person can put on the wall the lithography of Joan d'Arc or Napoleon, the pictures of Achilles or Nahimov, shelf the memoirs of Marshal Zhukov or war diaries of gen. Galder- and enjoy being a war buff. Time goes on; we have drones roaming the sky now.
Wasn't it Albert Camus though who said, 'Past is not dead. It had not even passed?' If we consider time as some kind of a fabric, similar to space, the places of those events would be the places of enormous sinkholes, the concave curvatures, the time traps where horror and glory, shame and fame, nobility and cowardice, courage and desperation are compressed under unbelievable pressures to show the true face of humanity to the future generations and maybe even to someone studying us from afar, deciding if we are worth it.
I never were in Volgograd when I lived in Russia. I was born long after the WWII and to me those events should not have much of a meaning. But I implore you to ask a Frenchman of my age about Verdun. I was in France and I asked. I asked different people in the bars, on the streets, in different settings. The reaction was the same: a proud smile, sparkling eyes and something like, 'Verdun" noblesse oblige.'
Nobility obliges. In the WWI the ancestors of those Frenchmen stood firm against the assault, they demonstrated an unbelievable courage and resolve and that wave of nobility pinned through the fabric of time, went through decades to General De Gaulle and Jean Moulin, to heroic women of Ravensbruck and even to the literally characters like Simonne by Feichtwanger and Unconquered by Somerset Maugham. It went through. Whether a person is a French immigrant, a chef in some restaurant, maybe an actor or a student- he or she has an echo inside, even a stir of echoes, voices whispering day and night like they whispered to Joan d'Arc ,'Noblesse oblige.' You have to try to be in your life at least somehow similar to those people, the ones you never knew but who knew about you. They did it for you.
Nobility obliges. The people at Stalingrad were ordinary people. They could surrender that nightmarish place; Russia was big. They could just forget it. Yes, there were orders and repressions and possible repercussions but those were not the real driving forces. There was something else. That something was the feeling of the just cause. Russian peasants and farmers, Russian young officers who had to command and send to death people much older than them, Russian political leaders, Russian generals and colonels. Russian women in the factories, Russian children hunting for food, Russian pilots and tank commanders, Russian medical personnel, even Russian horses and dogs- they all knew that their cause was just. It was the Noble Rage, like it says in the Russian battle song of the WWII, 'Let Noble Rage rise like a wave'. A wave? What could the Germans stop it with? Lily Marlen and Joerst Vessel? There were no good songs on the German side and the only thing they got was Goebbels's hysterics in the Sportpalats, the beginning of the end of the most inhumane and barbaric entity in the history of Humanity. It was over. The Nobility of the Russian people became an overwhelming force, it swept through Europe like fire and the legacy if it remained in every person who was born there forever, even if a person does not realize it. It thunders in the soul if you have one. It makes you a better person if you are a person. You can't escape it if you want to be human.
Of course there are many human- like individuals who desperately work on losing their humanity. Those are the ones who praise German soldiers and their "resolve'. Those are the ones who speak about "Russian Ivan -- a barbarian who raped poor German women in Berlin.' Those are the ones who make movies in which Germans and Russians are the same while glorious Allies are all- cool and Pattonesque. Those are the ones who use Russia and its history only for negative references, who do not want to pay tribute to those who saved Humanity. If we look now, the most honorable tributes to Russian efforts come (to our surprise) from the democratic sources in Germany and Italy. Those people not only had learned a lesson- they know that nobility obliges and they do it in tribute to their own heroes- to Sofia Scholl and Claus von Stauffenberg, to Garibaldi brigades and Curzio Malaparte. Noble wave touches all; it does not discriminate.
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