[hef19898]

We visited Verdun this year, including Forts Vaux and Doaumont. The athmosphere, including the beautiful forest, around the battle fields is special. And outright spooky in the partially flooded forts.

Totally different from the D-Day beaches. The outright slaughter on WW1 battlefields is just incomprehinsible, and it shows at places like Verdun.

[jacquesm]

I helped some people locate the grave sites of ancestors, not all is as documented as you would like it to be and there are quite a few mix-ups in names and DOB and so on (there shouldn't be, but that's the reality). This meant we visited multiple such sites in a very short period of time, and after the first couple it starts to really get to you: I could do this all day, every day of the year and never visit the same place twice.

In NL alone there are 3900 sites dedicated to WWII graves, ranging from single individuals, airplane crews (of planes that have never been dug up) all the way to grave sites so large that you can't see one end from the other. It is more than just a little impressive to see row after row with the names of people that came thousands of kilometers to die defending a country that they had otherwise probably never visited or would have never visited. In France and Belgium there are fewer such sites but they tend to be (much) larger, Lorraine in particular is impressive in the same way that a visit to a former concentration camp is.

It strikes me as that those poor guys that came here to liberate these countries would each and every one of them be absolutely horrified to see the state of affairs today, the degree to which we have betrayed them is something that we will never be able to wash off. The fact that the ultra-right is now exactly the thing they fought against and that it is the children of the beneficiaries of their sacrifice that are bringing this evil back into the world is what I find most horrifying. Really, I never really got the 'history repeats itself' thing at the gut level until I made that connection.

WWI is similarly impressive, but I don't have any family members that had that in living memory who are alive any more. But my grandmother lived through both of these, WWI did not impact as much here as WWII so I know far more of the first hand stories about WWII. But that doesn't mean that I'm unmoved by the history and seeing the remains of it (the grave sites and the 'no go' sites that are still too dangerous today) is formative. The 'Zone Rouges' are expected to be around for at least several more centuries...

Ukraine is headed there.

[hef19898]

Kudos for doing that!

And I agree on the concentration camp visit, even if I'd say those places are even worse than military cemiteries. I only visited on so far, and that pretty recently, Dachau. Quite sobbering experience, and I only looked into the crematorium from the outside. And then you realize that Dachau was one of the better and less cruel camps the Nazis ran...

And yes, the right became what they fought: they supported the fight against the Nazis and oppossed the communist Soviets. Now they are supporting borderline fascist policies and Russia, oppose NATO (there are tons of stuff NATO did that deserve being opposed, but thise are not a problem for the right), and accept support from Putin...

My grandparents, both sides, lived actively through WW2 (soldiers, nurses and just young women teying to get along) in Germany. They never really talked about it, but it marked them. I never met my great-grand father who survived Verdun and some gas attacks in WW1 so. Overall, this period is still much closer than we think, too close maybe to be sure that we actually really passed it and wont go down that specific rabbit hole again.