WWII – The Stories That Made Us

 

“The dust never truly settled after WWII” is one of the things I said in my podcast for our WWII project. At surface it can seem obvious; borders have changed, treaties have been made, and changes in political structure echos to this very day, but living in the western world makes us forget about the true consequences of the war on humanity. We forget about the the state the world was in and even more importantly, we forget about the individual stories that lead us to the place we are today. Connecting back to a previous humanities project, I noted that it is the individual stories that allow us to form the emotional or personal connection to the event. I explained how numbers can make you sad but the story of a orphaned child, much like yourself, well that can make you cry. The power of that connection is pretty incredible to me. One so strong it can break the barrier of time and float through the years right into your heart, making you gain a new perspective on life. 

 

People often say that experiences are fleeting moments, unique to the individual, and lost in time forever after the moment has passed. The falsity of this statement can be proven with something as deep as human derivatives. Connecting to another note I made after feeling upset from our current world division, states that the importance of learning history is not to feel smarter but to become a more educated person. The difference between the two is what it chemically does to your being. One’s paradigm or their lens on life is centred around experiences, knowledge, and placement in our world. Learning the timeline of WWII won’t change your paradigm, but being told the experience of a human in the war will make your lens shift. It will chemically change how you make sense of the world, how you feel, and how you react to experiences in your future. 

There was no one puppeting Hitler to do what he did, just a life of experiences, and specific reactions to them. The thing about history though, which is one thing that I’ve come to understand after learning of the tragedies of the past, is that every experience, every life lost has a story, and that story is what propels us into the future. When you look at events today such as the current Russia and Ukraine conflict, it makes you wonder how we could even think of having another war after going through WWII only 77 years ago. It makes you question why stories of murdered babies doesn’t make them rethink an air strike, or bombed schools doesn’t make them wonder if this conflict is really worth it, if the loss of trillions of dollars is just something they don’t want to risk. 

Over the past few weeks in the Performance Learning Program, the grade 10 cohort has investigated the importance of stories in understanding and answering the driving question: How might we use stories to better understand the causes and consequences of WWII? The project would result in the creation of a class podcast with 23 individual podcasts led by my classmates. The podcast would be about 7 minutes long and would tell a story of our choosing from World War II. Before we could set off on the episode though, we first had to learn a little bit about this war. Our knowledge was guided by a specific novel that was based during the seven year conflict. 

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Being away during the day we chose the books left me stranded with the most difficult book to read out of the ones provided. I was scared. Not only because it was more than 500 pages long, but the last time I had read a book was the previous year. I knew it wasn’t going to be done with ease, but I knew that it was going to be a good book, so I started on the journey, the adventure that would be reading All The Light You Can Not See by Anthony Doerr. I figured that if I was going to spend my time reading this gargangewous novel, I had to get the most I could out of every page, with my statement of learning intent in mind, I searched for the most meaningful outcome of the book. 

 

Throughout the novel I was able to take note of many important antidotes about life in the war and the horror that lay in the time period. I learned of the role of experience, as well as what drives both sides at war. Throughout the novel, even though I found myself behind during most reading check ins, with the help of the notes I made, I was able to poll deep and meaningful questions, connections and observations on the story told in the novel. Although I never made it to the very end of the novel, with these connections, my thoughts on the novel were seeping through my brain, and when it was time to reflect on the novel, the words just fell onto the page. 

I can take a step back on this process and notice the importance it holds in my learning as a student. I have said in other posts how I had learned the value of doing extra work, thus making future work hold more meaning, but in this process, I realized that if you have a goal, and idea, or purpose to your learning, you will have blank lines to fill, you have the foundation for success. I also think that is why these projects feel more fulfilling as a time passes; because now I have interests and questions that I long to answer, allowing me to direct my learning and my time towards this knowledge that holds significance in my life. 

Using those ideas I had gathered from the novel I came up with the topic I would choose to cover in my podcast. Although my idea had fluctuated from radios in the war, when I remembered my questions of humanity in the war, I decided I would dive into the phycological impact of WWII, the human side of the war. To be honest, I didn’t really know where I was going with this topic, and I questioned my choice for many days. This had been the first project of my second semester which is definitely quite the shock coming out of semester one. The constant transition between science, math, maker, and humanities has been a very hard adaptation, but as I mentioned in my Ology of Apology post, humans are quite good at doing just that. By this point in the project, this value I had had for this year of meaning was beginning to show a slow entropy, and my macho was beginning to lead me down the dark and musty path of “getting through” the assignment.  

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I spent days researching, and as I did so, sparks of interest began to start coming, almost as if the life of knowledge was beating back to life. I started to find articles about the science behind the mental impacts, I stated watching historical documentaries, sharing primary evidence of the stories from this consequence, and I began to start flowing. 

Balancing basketball and  school led to a few late nights of making my script, but what I once thought would be a dry page of facts, became a rushing river of untold perspectives and scientific knowledge that I knew would have the reader feeling full with intrigue. I have to say that after reading my script the first time, I felt it lacked that meaning I heard in my heart, it could have been I just didn’t have the energy push my language to be concise, but I felt like I did writing this blogpost, questioning if I am really getting that point across. 

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Using the help of my pears and my family of listeners, I was able to revise and revise until it was where I wanted it to be. As I look back now, I feel pretty impressed with the work I created in these few weeks. This project was lead by ups and downs, but I feel very proud of the work I created in the short time we had for this project. Not once did I come to class feeling unprepared no matter how behind I was. Not once did I question the completion of my work, and not once did I let myself down by settling for “getting by”. 

I realized in this project that interest will not just make things easier, but interest as well as deep thinking is what I can rely on to make my work the best it can be, no matter how much I doubt my result. I have learned the importance of priority, and I continue to learn where my time is best spent for achieveIng that goal of meaning I had envisioned at the beginning of the year.

Through the learning in this project and the extra effort put into understanding things that I felt important to know, I was able to construct the answer  “We can use the stories of experiences to understand the derivatives of conflict and the un-taught perspectives of war. We can use stories of fear, loss, and triumph to understand the human consequences of WWII and how it had impacted every soul, in a similar, yet completely dependent way.” To answer this project’s driving question. Relating to myself, I would never had been able to understand this conflict to the extent I do without hearing these stories from WWII. I would not have had the empathy for these soldiers who lost their lives and their livelihoods fighting the beast which was only another human on the other side. Without stories, our understanding on life would be nothing, our perspective on war would be monotones. These stories give life meaning, they give purpose to these horrific times we would rather forget. That’s why I raise those questions at the start of this post. Its not that these things happen from ignorance, they happen because of ignore-ance.  These experiences, these moments of time, they are never forgotten, they are only ignored. This time we live in of Covid, of climate change, or division, it is not just struggle that escapes through the tunnel that it may seem we are in, no, its lessons, stories, growth as humanity, and chances to look back and feel proud of our people, to feel that everyone that we have lost, has been fundamental changes to get us where we are today. So next time you feel that moments are not important, think again, because that moment might be the story that changes the future.

Thank you for reading another gargangewous post, and I hope you comment any thoughts or questions you may have on this post.