World War I - A Personal Story

Abstract

For me, the First World War brings visions of the home I had never known. A strange statement? Let me explain, since of course I did not live during that war. Growing up I heard much about it. My childhood coincided with the entire Second World War, experiences that overwhelmingly make accounts of the First World War bearable. We, children during World War II, did not know any other childhood. Not expecting anything, we were satisfied with little. Our worldview was still that of the World War I generation with our belief in the normality of a life of decent people who share basic ideas about what constitutes good and who know where true values reside. My generation of Ukrainian immigrants who came of age in America in the 1950s and 1960s still publicly marked November 1918 and 1919 — liberation and unification of the Ukrainian People’s Republic — as a heroic attempt. In our stories, we mused how Ukraine would eventually gain its independence, as other Eastern European states had done after WWI. Our pseudo-European Displaced Persons camp experiences gave us a precarious affinity to things European. My decadeolder brother dismissed my choice of a history major with a breezy: “Martha has to figure out how we got here.” He went on to study mathematics to explore the cosmos, while I scurried into the ever more labyrinthine presentations of the past.