Hiroshima and the World : Tragedies Bestow No Privilege

Introduction :
World War Two introduced mass destruction of cities and their populations. Half of the building in which I grew up had been destroyed by a bomb during the siege of Leningrad. As kids we played in the ruins, which shows that a child can turn anything into a toy. These childhood memories came back later, on a bicycle ride with my own children in Belgium. Vast spaces were covered with hundreds of thousands of tombs of fallen soldiers from France, Germany, Canada, India and many other countries, whose governments had sent them to World War I. “What were they fighting for ?” asked my youngest son. “Hard to tell,” was my answer. Indeed, we know in minute detail how that war was fought but not why it began and for what purpose it consumed millions of lives.

Last summer, I took my youngest daughter to Bobruisk, Belarus. It is there that the advancing German army gunned down my father’s grandparents, alongside all the town’s Jews, in 1941. My father had ample reason to demonize the Germans but he never did. Nor, having endured the entire 900 days of the siege in Leningrad, did he glorify war. A Soviet citizen deprived of religious education, he nevertheless remained a carrier of the Jewish tradition. I came to recognize this when I began to study how traditional Judaism relates to war.

Pour lire l’artcle en intégralité.
Pour accéder au Hiroshima Peace Media Center.