This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.
Michael Commane
As a result of the column that appeared in this newspaper last week a German woman contacted me and told me the following story.
She came across some old documents belonging to her mother and among them she found some interesting papers. They included the military pass of her first husband, who was in the German army, serving as a paramedic. He was killed three kilometres from Kalusch, which lies in the southwest of Ukraine in July 1944.
In a Christmas card to his wife in 1943 he wrote: ‘Now is not the right time to say too much. And the last sentence went: ‘Remain as you are and keep loving me, yours Paul.’ Seven months later he was dead.
The person who contacted me commented in one short sentence that it was with that pain and sadness that she grew up.
I found her words extraordinarily stark and it set me thinking again of the brutality of war. If we can ban the smoking of cigarettes in public places why can’t we ban war?
Her words also made me ever so conscious of what it means to live in peace and how privileged I have been to live in this part of the island, having never experienced war or civil unrest. Personally, I thank the founding fathers of he European Union for my good fortune.
The same day I received that note from the German woman I found myself chatting with a member of staff in the hospital where I work. We were having a cup of coffee, exchanging pleasantries and when she told me where she lived I asked her might she know a friend of mine.
To my pleasant surprise it turned out that she grew up on the same road as he did. He is a close friend and I know him the best part of 50 years.
He is a fellow Dominican and a person I greatly admire.
Since our conversation I have been thinking about it and all the pleasant details we were able to share. She told me her mother had been a nurse and so had his, and maybe that’s how both women got to know one another. Who knows? But aren’t they some of the magic moments of our lives when we can link up with other people in friendliness and camaraderie. So often we take such moments and details for granted.
They are anything but. Think of the world of war.
Paul, who died a young man in Ukraine, most definitely had little time or opportunity to engage in the simplest of conversations, talking about this and that.
Soldiers are ordered to kill people, with whom in other circumstances they might well be sharing a cup of coffee and discovering that their parents or grandparents knew one another. Maybe the person who killed him shared similar ideas and hobbies as he.
That’s how evil and absurd war is.
When you think of the details and minutiae we engage in in keeping society ticking over and working for the betterment of all and then how we can on the other hand so easily walk into war. It makes no sense at all.
Wise words from Bertrand Russell: ‘War does not determine who is right - only who is left.’
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