Everytime I am at my parent's place I have to pay my grandparents a visit. Today I got them some groceries and had a chat with my grandma. We talked a bit about me going to Australia and she said that when she was young, she did not have the chance to go abroad. When she was 16, the war started and she sought shelter from the bombs penned up in basements. I am lucky that all my grandparents survived both wars, but they rarely speak about it. My grandfather learned Russian in captivity as prisoner of war. Somehow, they managed to get along, they managed to get over it.
Me, being born in the 80s, too young to remember the dangers of the cold war, I never had to experience privation or existential fear. Yet, there still is war and people are suffering. It was like that in Southeast Europe and it is the same in Georgia right now.
A few years ago on an excursion to Northern Serbia, we could see what NATO bombs had done to the previously vivid multicultural city of Novi Sad. Talking to the people there, students our age at night in the ruins of the former Austro-Hungarian fortress on the river banks, playing the guitar, drinking beer and singing Simon&Garfunkel songs, they told about alarms in the middle of the night, the angst the sounds of airplanes caused, the unnatural red light illuminating the city when the close by oil refinery was hit and exploded in flames. Hearing stories about war from the grandparents leaves them ages away. Hearing them from a fellow student a few hundred kilometres away catapults them into your life, but leaves you deranged. And yet, it was only the missing bridges we saw. By now, years later, they are partly rebuild, though Serbia is recovering still.
At work one of my colleagues is from Georgia. Not that she ever was little Miss Sunshine, but in those days she looked even more pale, even more withdrawn than usual. No one cared. Her family lives in Tiblisi, but they heard the bombs. The hits. The explosions. I imagine them crouched down in their apartment, the TV trembling under the impacts, phone lines down, Internet down, electricity down. Reduced to the fundamental essentials about being human: fear.
Me, being born in the 80s, too young to remember the dangers of the cold war, I never had to experience privation or existential fear. Yet, there still is war and people are suffering. It was like that in Southeast Europe and it is the same in Georgia right now.
A few years ago on an excursion to Northern Serbia, we could see what NATO bombs had done to the previously vivid multicultural city of Novi Sad. Talking to the people there, students our age at night in the ruins of the former Austro-Hungarian fortress on the river banks, playing the guitar, drinking beer and singing Simon&Garfunkel songs, they told about alarms in the middle of the night, the angst the sounds of airplanes caused, the unnatural red light illuminating the city when the close by oil refinery was hit and exploded in flames. Hearing stories about war from the grandparents leaves them ages away. Hearing them from a fellow student a few hundred kilometres away catapults them into your life, but leaves you deranged. And yet, it was only the missing bridges we saw. By now, years later, they are partly rebuild, though Serbia is recovering still.
At work one of my colleagues is from Georgia. Not that she ever was little Miss Sunshine, but in those days she looked even more pale, even more withdrawn than usual. No one cared. Her family lives in Tiblisi, but they heard the bombs. The hits. The explosions. I imagine them crouched down in their apartment, the TV trembling under the impacts, phone lines down, Internet down, electricity down. Reduced to the fundamental essentials about being human: fear.
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