Quote:
Originally Posted by CCIP
Yeah, for me growing up in Russia, it was really something to be surrounded by the material history of the war. I can't understand how people can avoid being touched by it - everyone's been affected somehow.
My own moment as kid came when I was at the Piskarev Cemetery on a cloudy day with almost noone around. Everyone always looks at the monument, but I was just fixated on the mass graves there - a patch of ground that's barely a few football fields in size. It just blew my mind that 500,000 people were buried there, most of them dead by cold and starvation, and that was but a tiny fraction of those killed in that war. Still gives me chills when I think of the moment when, somehow, the reality of that figure dawned on me while standing right among the rows of flat, nondescript ground where hundreds of thousands rested. |
The number that always struck me was the 800,000 dead at the siege of Leningrad. More than the US lost in the whole war. You wonder how a nation goes through misery like that without melting down. Maybe a history of similar miseries helps?
On a lighter note I found this Theodor Geissel (Dr. Seuss) editorial cartoon from June 1941 New York newspaper very appropriate.
