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The Gift of Memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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Based on a talk given in London at a Pax Christi mdemnce on 3 September 1989 marking the 50th annivematy of the outbreak of World War II.
We are told to remember the Second World War, but how? I was born just a few days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have no stories to tell of my own. Maybe that does not matter. Remembering something as awful as the War can only happen later, long after it is over. To remember is not just to sit back and let the facts surface. It is the creative business of putting things together, re-membering, so that we discover for the first time what it was really like. Robert Kee was a RAF bomber who kept detailed diaries of the war, but afterwards they did not turn out to be of much help: ‘For all the quite detailed evidence of these diary entries I can’t add up a very coherent picture of how it really was to be in a bomber squadron in those days. There’s nothing you could really get hold of if you were trying to write a proper historical account of it all... No wonder it is those artists who recreate life rather than try to recapture it who, in one way, prove the good historians in the end.’
It is like the writing of the gospels. It took forty years before the disciples could tell the story of Jesus, and of how they betrayed him and ran away. It took about the same length of time that separates us from the Second World War before the disciples could cope with remembering what had happened, and so write the first gospel. Like them we are just getting to the point where we can begin to remember.
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- Copyright © 1989 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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