“My father and his family were in one of Hitler’s camps, and many of my relatives were murdered by cruel doctors/nurses in Siberian concentration camps”
I am sorry.
Oh, combat_boots, that is so very nice, thank you. No one dwells on it, and my parents (and my grandparents, I still have one grandmother who’s alive) have basically never talked about it in my 40+ years on earth.
I do try to talk to other family friends and more recent emigres to find out what exactly went on under Stalinist and Hitler’s rule, although I don’t want to dwell on it too long either.
What scares me the most is that my parents are seeing this happening all over again. No matter that a relatively small group of people remember what happened 70+ years ago, history’s being repeated. That’s why I feel we must spend our energy on here and now and the future. It feels like we are on an unchangeable course, but I like to believe that we can still make a difference. That we won’t look back, or our children look back, and wonder why relatively few fought back.
A lot of the things that were going on then during war (restrictions on travel, people were all considered lawbreakers because so many new laws were in place, a disregard for human life, no fair trials, so on) are deja vu to too many!