
A Hundred Unchildlike Lullabies - lermontov
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2602/last-witnesses-an-oral-history-of-the-children-of-world-war-ii-by-svetlana-alexievich-22005
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tempguy9999
I heard a lot at school why we should learn history. It was so we could learn
"lessons" from it.

Learn what? I always wondered. No-one ever told us. Not once I can ever
recall.

As I stopped being a kid I started to form my own view that said "lessons"
were how monstrous things can be. We forget those lessons. I see people never
understanding them because they've grown up in a peaceful society in a
peaceful family. What they're used to defines how things are to them, and, so
terribly mistakenly, how things will always be.

These kinds of guys (it's usually guys) who say "life's a bitch and then you
die", and I so want to slap their stupid, comfortable faces off.

My brothers and I had a... childhood, let's say. We won't make that mistake;
we know life isn't intrinsically safe because it never was. Every day we pay
for that, and that's how it is. But compared to these horrors, none of us
could complain.

"She remembers as an authentic miracle a dog that followed her home at some
point deep into the nine-hundred-day siege and saved her family from almost
certain death. She has been asking the dog’s forgiveness ever since."

"a twelve-year-old boy remembers using frozen German corpses as sleds"

And plenty more just in that extract.

We were taught the worthless shit in history, the date of gallipoli, details
of hitler's beer-hall putsch, and surely that was right, I don't think many
children can face the ugliest reality of war without getting mangled, but this
awfulness needs to be be learnt at some time so people understand things _can_
collapse into utter hellishness, and the only thing stopping it is, perhaps,
themselves. It's not another's responsibility, it is one's own. I've come to
understand history does matter because history is a warning, if you care to
listen.

~~~
derefr
The type of "history" you're talking about—not the one we've lost and have to
put together out of old documents; but rather the history we _do_ have clear
records of, but which lies dormant and outside of culture, left unknown by all
but those who would specifically seek it out (mostly because of the
gruesomeness of its "lessons")—is studied pretty much only by officers-in-
training in military academies.

History—in the oldest meaning of "making a study of history"—isn't one of the
liberal arts. It was never studied for its own sake. The study of history
wasn't something like Latin or Mathematics that the nobility of old thought
would "expand the mind"; instead, it was a very practical thing—the study of
the history _of state_ and the history _of war_ , usually by those aiming to
become strategists and run new states or wage new wars.

Seen through this lens, the "lessons" of history are pretty obvious ones:
they're the strategic mistakes made by those monarchs and diplomats and
generals and spies of the past, the ones that got them killed or their
countries sundered.

Sadly, in the opinion of seemingly every society throughout, well, history,
nobody but those who would put these lessons to immediate, practical use has
need of learning them; and those who don't need them are seen as being better
off left unexposed to them.

------
Reedx
See also Grave of the Fireflies. Powerful and heartbreaking.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_of_the_Fireflies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_of_the_Fireflies)

------
braaap
The translated book title is "Last Witnesses"? How much better is the
original, "A Hundred Unchildlike Lullabies"? Haunting.

~~~
dang
I felt so too, which is why we used that title above.

------
bhk
> ... in the course of the book, two people’s hair is described as having
> turned white in a day.

How many here believe that someone's hair can turn white in one day?

~~~
tempguy9999
A kind of hell brought to earth, and _that_ detail was the one that stuck out
for you?

Well I guess if it's so important it must deserve an answer.

The mechanism I've heard is some people have salt-and-pepper hair, that is a
mix of dark and white hairs. The dark ones can be affected by stress and fall
out more easily.

A littel googling and here you go,
<[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/09/canities-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/09/canities-
subita/500576).

As I've answered your question, perhaps you won't mind answering mine; what
did you make of the rest of the article?

