Category: Memory

The Presence of the Past: Naples, the Dead and the Living

angela findlayLeave a comment

As we approach the season of All Souls, Samhain and the Day of the Dead, many cultures turn their attention to the boundary between the living and the dead, traditionally believed to be thinnest at this time of year. I love this time of year and my interest in the hidden continuities between past and present recently took me beneath the cobblestones of Naples, a city where more than 2,000 years of human history lie stacked, layered and knitted into the present.

Walking around the city means ducking and diving through a buzz of beeping motorbikes and scented washing lines before descending into the volcanic tufa beneath your feet for an almost visceral encounter with human mortality.

Exploring its catacombs, subterranean cemeteries and ancient graves was neither morbid nor depressing. Instead, it revealed extraordinary ways of living alongside the dead. So I invite you to come with me into the underworld, to meet physical death face to face and perhaps also to reflect on our own relationships with those who came before us.

The Sansevero Chapel ‘Veiled Christ’

Our first stop is the Cappella Sansevero, home to Giuseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ, sculpted in 1753. It is possibly the most sublime representation of death I have ever encountered. Carved from a single block of marble, Christ’s lifeless body, muscles still taut from pain, lies beneath a transparent veil so exquisitely rendered that it appears almost to breathe against the skin. The technical achievement is astonishing, but so is the sculpture’s ability to render death as something intimate and beautiful.

Our next stop is the Catacombs of San Gennaro, named after Naples’ patron saint, whose remains were transferred here in the fifth century. Vast burial chambers carved into the city’s soft, golden volcanic rock contain ancient tombs, sarcophagi and beautiful frescoes. Bodies were placed inside burial niches and sealed with marble slabs or terracotta tiles, while others were laid in pits dug into the floors. The stench of decay would have been intense, yet people regularly visited their departed relatives and the tombs of the saints, maintaining relationships with the dead as a natural extension of the community of the living.

Catacombs of San Gennaro

The nearby Catacombs of San Gaudioso tell a more unsettling story. During the seventeenth century, a practice known as scolatura involved placing bodies in stone niches or seats to drain as they decomposed. Once dried, the bones were collected. For certain aristocrats and high-ranking clergy who paid immense sums, skulls were embedded into the walls with frescoes painted beneath them depicting the clothing associated with their social standing or accoutrements of their profession.

Catacombs of San Gaudioso

I have never witnessed anything quite like it: the messiest realities of our physical humanity combined with an apparent determination to preserve status and identity beyond the grave. Was it defiance, vanity or fear of extinction? Or the belief that wealth can buy you favours even in the face of death?

Our next stop, the Fontanelle Cemetery, is a place where social distinctions and privileges were ultimately dissolved. Housed in a vast former tufa quarry from which much of Naples’ building stone had been extracted, it became an overflow repository for the city’s dead. Epidemics, poverty and overcrowded burial grounds left countless people without individual graves or markers. Death was the leveller, as rich and poor mingled in a sea of anonymous bones.

Fontanelle Cemetery

In 1872, however, something extraordinary happened. The priest Gaetano Barbati, assisted by local women, undertook to organise the scattered remains. Around this period, the devotion known as anime pezzentelle – the veneration of abandoned souls in Purgatory – flourished.

Women from the neighbourhood would adopt individual skulls, cleaning them, giving them names and praying for their souls. In return, they might ask for protection, a miracle or a little luck in their own lives, even a winning lottery number. If a wish was granted, they might create a small wooden or marble shrine to house the skull, adding their own name to give an identity where there had been none.

The act of giving dignity to the forgotten dead reminds me of the practice of Family Constellations, which I have been studying for the past two years. In this work, we witness how the silence surrounding exclusion, grief or shame in one generation can continue to shape the present for generations after, and how acknowledging and reintegrating those who have been ostracised or forgotten can help bring a sense of peace.

Pompeii
Herculaneum

Our final stop takes us south of Naples to Pompeii and Herculaneum, where the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 brought ordinary life to a sudden and devastating end. While various beautiful wall paintings and mosaics survive, in Pompeii the volcanic pumice and ash that covered the city often left cavities where some victims’ bodies had decomposed. Archaeologists later filled these voids with plaster, creating casts of the final positions of those who died. The effect is profoundly moving.

Walking through these streets and houses, the distance between AD 79 and 2026 seems to collapse. Their world was different from ours, yet the essentials of human life are remarkably similar.

Pompei
Pompei
Herculaneum

At Herculaneum, streets of beautiful villas were buried beneath deposits of volcanic material, including mud, up to 25 meters deep. Wooden furniture and doors as well as other organic materials were preserved and mosaic floors and murals survived remarkably intact. Down by what had once been the harbour, excavations revealed the skeletal remains of hundreds of people sheltering in vaulted stone chambers, as they awaited rescue by boat.

Herculaneum

I found it strangely shocking to be confronted with the bones and skulls of real people. Not that I feel squeamish about or removed from the concept of death, but I am trying to think when, within my own mix of cultural experiences, I come face to face with a skeleton.

As the only living resident of a cemetery, I am used to having extremely quiet neighbours. I have pondered their lives and legacies. While dying can be deeply distressing, painful and sometimes frightening, and grief devastating for those left behind, I find that when I contemplate the dead, I overwhelmingly feel a sense of peace.

What strikes me most about all these sites is how the past is not a mere relic. For example, the La Paranza social cooperative that manages the Catacombs of San Gennaro and San Gaudioso, are helping revitalise the notoriously dangerous, isolated and poor Rione Sanità neighbourhood through employment and opportunities for local young people. The dead are quite literally supporting the living.

That support is another quality that has frequently made itself known to me in my work – with my grandfather, my great-great-aunt Joan and others: the sense that beyond our physical mortality there can also be so much heart, light and love among the dead. It’s as though they are willing us, from behind the threshold of mystery, to live and be happy.

To me, Naples therefore offers a powerful reminder of what can happen when we look death in the face, give it a name and allow it a place in our present. After all, it is the destiny we all share.

Between Light and Darkness: From Jena’s Rebels to Buchenwald

angela findlay7 Comments

“I think you’ll like this,” a friend said unloading a hardback the size and weight of a breeze block. Slightly daunted and clueless about the rebels of its title, it sat atop the leaning tower of my bedside book pile. When I finally picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. 

Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf transported me to the small university town of Jena (pronounced ‘Yain-a’) near Weimar, where, between 1795 and 1803, a group of brilliant minds coalesced and forever changed the world.

Known as the First Romantics, they were far more than the modern associations with sentimentality and solitary figures in idealised landscapes. This group of Germany’s brightest poets, philosophers and scientists – Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Novalis, the Schlegel and von Humboldt brothers, Schelling, and their wives – rebelled against the fragmented, rationalised worldview of the Enlightenment. Against the backdrop of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s armies, they revolutionised thinking, paving the way for modernity, the liberation of the Ich (Self), and the idea of free will.

Jena lay at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither Holy nor Roman but encompassed much of present-day Germany. Its university was governed by four Saxon rulers from different duchies, making rules difficult to enact and enforce. Escaping the censorship other universities faced, it became more progressive and open-minded than anywhere else. So while England, Spain and France turned outwards towards colonies and the United States, Germany remained inward-looking. With 40 universities (compared to England’s two) books were everywhere, fuelling imaginations and breaking new ground in people’s internal worlds. 

With the liberal-minded intellectual Caroline Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling (she married three times!) as the beating heart of the group, the Jena Set sought to poetise the increasingly mechanical world. They tore down boundaries between the arts, sciences, nature and the divine, weaving them together into a new reality. This recognition of the interconnectedness of all disciplines, with the Self and the arts as sense-makers of the world, ignited something in me, just as it had for many others both during their lifetimes and over the following two centuries. In our increasingly technicalised world, their conception of the world feels more relevant than ever. 

My excitement reading this book was so visceral that this January I travelled to Jena and Weimar to roam the streets they once inhabited. Like them, experiencing a place using all the senses is essential for me to understanding it. Jena didn’t disappoint, despite much of its architecture being destroyed during WWII and later by GDR urban policies. I could almost hear their excited chatter as they crossed the cobbled marketplace, made their way to the Schlegels’ salon, or wandered each other’s minds as they strolled the river in ‘Paradise’. This was Germany at its best – a land of poets and thinkers as well as composers such as Bach, Beethoven and Handel.

Three days later, I visited Buchenwald, a short bus ride from Goethe’s main home town of Weimar. The former concentration camp stood in stark contrast to the Jena I had just explored. Built in 1937, less than 20 years after architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar – a movement that, like the Jena Set, united disciplines, fusing art, craft and architecture into one of the most influential streams in modern design – it imprisoned Jews, political dissidents, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, religious leaders, Polish citizens, women, children, artists and writers… people labelled as wrong, inferior, of no worth.

The gates of Buchenwald bear the provocative words JEDEM DAS SEINE (‘To Each His Own’), furtively created in Bauhaus-style lettering by a defiant inmate. Once inside, the visitor instantly shrinks to a moving speck in the vast, seemingly empty arena of former suffering. I clocked the tapping of a distant woodpecker before being swallowed by the site’s app, which conjured visions of hell as I moved from freezing roll calls to the disinfection station, through over-crowded bunks, and into the crematorium ovens.

The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day on 27th January 2026 is ‘Bridging Generations.’ Like my VE Day talks last year – including one with Henry Montgomery (‘Monty’s’ grandson) at the National Army Museum, and more recently with James Holland and Al Murray on their popular WWII podcast We have Ways of Making You Talk – it’s a call to action. As contemporary witnesses die out, the responsibility for remembrance must pass to those who came after.

Yet, as a recent Times article highlighted, the number of schools marking the Holocaust has more than halved since the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7th October 2023. This is deeply concerning. It reveals a profound misunderstanding of what the Holocaust warns us about the present. Strip away categories and nationalities, and both perpetrators and victims were first and foremost ordinary people, like you and me.

Caroline Schlegel

The contrast between the intellectual vibrancy of Jena and the grim history of Buchenwald mirrors Germany’s descent from soaring heights to depraved depths.

While grieving the death of his beloved fiancée, the Jena Set poet Novalis discovered a new imagery of darkness. He likened his routine descents into the salt mines of Weißenfels to a journey through the wilderness of the self and the universe. He embraced the night as a place of transformation, knowing, as they all did, that light and dark are inseparable.

For me, regular descents into the darkness of prisons or into Germany’s Nazi past have become similar excavations of the human condition. Novalis found a higher existence in the darkness. I found smaller gems. The most important of them all: both the brightest light and the deepest darkness live within us.

Watch or listen to my episode ‘How to commemorate WW2’ on the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast

Remembering, while watching falling leaves…

angela findlay6 Comments

I normally plant bulbs on Remembrance Sunday. But this year I’ve been ill. Instead I went for a gentle walk in nearby woods, silent but for the breeze combing its way through the upper branches.

Down below, all was still. Except for individual leaves falling like snow. Each one taking its moment to break from the twig to which it had been rooted since the spring and dance in a series of pirouettes, twirls and summersaults before landing quietly among the already fallen. Unseen except by a chance walker. 

Do they pick their moment, or are they plucked from life?

A certain readiness is a prerequisite for each leaf to fall. In summer, winds can howl through the branches and yet the leaves remain bound to the tree, weathering the storm, held in place by life forces that ebb and flow in synchrony with the seasons.

Death is natural for these fallen.

As I shuffle through the carpet of rust and gold, the rustle so reminiscent of childhood memories – kicking through the golden floors of beech forests in little rubber wellies – I can only ponder the dead. The war dead all around the world. The families they left behind. The scars of loss, grief, trauma and silence that remain in their wake, often hidden for generations, shaping the souls of those who come after.

We call them the fallen. It softens the reality of how they died. But while we remember them with warm hearts and deep gratitude, let us – with all the advantages of hindsight – not forget the utter horror, violence and futility of war.

As countries around the world build their armies and arsenal, let us refrain from falling into the trap of thinking war can ever be a solution to political, religious, geographical or economic problems.

Let us remember that the cost is always too high.

When big isn’t necessarily better

angela findlay4 Comments

Reflections on: IN PROCESS… a life, a film, a book, an exhibition, The Vaults, Stroud. Sunday 19th October, 11am-5pm and by appointment until 1st November.

 

“We must, we must, we must increase the bust.

The bigger the better, the tighter the sweater, the boys depend on us.”

I remember chanting that with my boarding school roommates as a teenager, elbows flung back in a futile attempt – in my case at least – to inflate our adolescent chests. Bigger was definitely better, or so we believed.

Burj Khalifa, Dubai

Skyscrapers, cars, salaries, houses… In so many areas of modern society, ‘big’ still equals ‘better.’ More followers, more likes, more headlines, more sales. The biggest countries led by the most powerful leaders and largest militaries make the most noise. And yet we know, quantity doesn’t equate to quality. Magnitude doesn’t always reflect meaning or value.

This idea – that bigger isn’t always better – is something I’ve seen reflected both in the trajectory of my great great aunt Joan’s life and in my own development as an artist. (If you are new to Joan’s story, please see my previous blogs for background.)

Patshull Hall, Staffordshire

Joan’s tent

Joan grew up in a 147-room stately home in Staffordshire. Yet she spent her final weeks in a single, often soggy Meade tent pitched in a remote Himalayan Valley, surrounded not by grandeur but by shepherds, wildflowers and the sound of rain. She had traded scale for purpose. And her joy, it seems, had grown as her material load had lessened.

My own artistic journey has followed a similarly inverse curve.

Painting a mural in Sydney, 1987

I began large, unable to contain any drawing or painting within the boundaries of paper or canvas. My work spilled onto walls, first private then public, then grew further to fill stage backdrops for theatres or touring bands. Various mishaps including a paint-splattered boss’s car and a disastrous commission to paint the backdrop for INXS KICK album tour in 1987, which promptly cracked and fell off in large chunks when rolled up, nudged me toward the more forgiving surface of prison walls. There, no amount of damage could make the environment worse than it already was.

The light danced, 120x120cm

Years later, I turned my focus to canvases of my own, their size dictated by the available studio space and commercial considerations of galleries. And most recently, to works just 28x28cm – or smaller. I have replaced the vast audiences of art fairs with the quiet intimacy of just six or seven visitors at a time into the two vaults beneath my home in Stroud’s Cemetery.

The Vaults

Those vaults now house In Process… a deeply personal exhibition about Joan, her life and the resonance her death still holds for me, our family and small communities she encountered in India.

In one vault, where gravediggers once hung their tools and I now hang mine, visitors watch a short film projected into the open lid of an old trunk telling the story of Joan Margaret Legge.

In the other, where those same workers drank tea, ghostly white plaster casts hang like three-dimensional botanical drawings reminiscent of the specimens Joan collected and sent to Kew Gardens.

‘138 days’

A series of square sketchbooks chart the 138 days I followed Joan’s 1939 diary entries. Starting on 17th February when I stepped into her shoes as she boarded a ship to India, I step out of them again on 4th July, the day she slipped off the edge of a Himalayan path to her death. One photograph, one sketchbook page, each day a quiet re-embodiment across time. Not a recreation of her journey, but a chance to listen more deeply to the changing tone of her voice in the final months of her life.

At the heart of the exhibition is its smallest piece: a re-working of a first edition of Frank Smythe’s Valley of Flowers, the very book that inspired Joan’s expedition. Through collage, drawings and pressed flowers, it now tells the stories of three visitors to the valley rather than just one: his, hers and mine. Wrapped in brown paper and tied with string like an archival package, the book invites visitors to wear white gloves to turn its delicate pages, not because it is precious in a monetary sense, but out of respect, Unlike most artworks, these ones are meant to be handled and engaged with.

‘Three journeys in one’

There is nothing for sale. No press campaign. No sponsorship. Just a quiet space, tucked away in a garden, found by invitation or chance. A strange but deliberate choice, and to me, a more authentic reflection of the humbleness of where Joan’s life ended than any traditional gallery could offer.

What Joan lost in material possessions, she gained in purpose and joy. Her life distilled into what nine porters could carry. She found a sense of completeness long before she had completed her journey.

That’s what I hope to convey in the improvised, immersive pieces shown in the warm belly of my limestone vaults. People forgive imperfection and lack of polish as they connect with Joan’s story through their hands, senses and bodies.

Just as artists learn to see not just form but negative space – the shapes between things – so Joan’s outwardly abundant life transformed into an inner world: slower, quieter, less visible, but not lesser in any way.

Maybe this is a natural outcome of ageing… the gentle decluttering of ambition and a reshuffling of values. Or maybe Joan’s story is a simple reminder that richness cannot always be seen and meaning doesn’t always require an audience.

The symmetry in our shrinking trajectories is just an observation.

But it feels strangely right.

IN PROCESS…

Sunday 19th October, 11am-5pm and by appointment until 1st November.

The Vaults, 114 Bisley Road, Stroud

 

 

 

Following Joan… Part Three

angela findlay6 Comments

(If you are joining Joan’s story now, you might want to read Following Joan… Parts One and Two first.) 

‘Do you think she jumped… or did she fall?’

It’s 2020 and I am sitting opposite my uncle, a grandfather clock tick-tocking the present into the past.

That question has always lingered around the name of my Great Great Aunt Joan. She was said to have been troubled, never having recovered from the death of her beloved older brother, Gerald, killed at Gallipoli in the First World War. Ill health had dogged her. And as another war loomed on the horizon, perhaps she could not bear to witness more loss. 

I sometimes wish I could type ‘Joan Legge’ into the search box of my life’s hard drive to locate the exact moment her story began to intrigue me. Perhaps it was a conversation with my grandmother, Joan’s niece. Both she and her younger sister had believed, independently, that Joan would not return from her trip to the Himalayas in 1939. Their mother was said to have ‘the gift’ – an unfathomable intuition, a form of knowing that slips past reason. 

That fascinated me, for even as a child I sensed there were hidden channels of communication and knowledge beneath the surface of ordinary life. Perhaps their foreboding of no return planted the idea that Joan’s death had been deliberate.

Joan 1905

Or maybe it came from the anecdotes I gleaned over time from my father and uncle about this eccentric spinster who, after Gerald’s death, cast off the frills and trappings of aristocracy and privilege to forge a life of farming, service and adventure. A life that ended in solitude, in a remote valley half a world away. 

Some lives close with a sense of completeness, even peace. Death may be welcomed after a struggle with illness or the slow wear of age. Others remain unfinished, wrapped in mystery, unresolved, tugging at the conscience of descendants like a child clutching at its mother’s apron strings. 

Joan’s sudden death was of that latter kind. It sent shock waves through the generations, softening with distance into small ripples. Even now they lap at the shores of my own soul. 

Map of the Valley of Flowers, the site of Joan’s camp, death & grave marked in red
©Staffordshire History Centre

It was only last year, travelling to the Valley of Flowers with three of Joan’s descendants, that I fully grasped the scale of her courage. And the violence of her end. The monsoon rains offered us just a fleeting glimpse of the place she fell, its position traced on a map sketched in the days after her death. Yet it was enough to shatter the gentler image I had long created of her tumbling down a wooded slope. The truth was starker. Joan had fallen clean over the edge of a sheer granite cliff.

Her fall haunts me. Those unthinkable seconds of awareness, knowing you are hurtling toward your end. How different from a death that comes inch by inch, offering time to prepare, to resist, to rage, or to reconcile. In July 2024, when I left the Valley of Flowers and Joan’s remote grave, a sudden grief overwhelmed me, buckling my legs and landing me in a pile of donkey droppings. Yet Joan’s own words leave no room for doubt. Her diaries brimmed with excitement for the months ahead, with awe for the surrounding peaks, and with delight in her adventure. She did not choose death. She was very much alive.

So why does her story touch me so deeply? Why not my great grandmother, killed in a car crash?  Why not my grandfather, the ‘muck and magic man’, pioneer of organic farming? Why Joan? And why me – the only one in the family drawn, again and again, to the lives behind us rather than those unfolding ahead? Is it because I have no children to anchor my gaze forward? Or is it that I have no children precisely because the voices behind me insisted on my attention?

Gerald (far left), Joan’s father (seated left), Joan (centre) and others, 1907

Perhaps neither, or both. What I do know is that the dead have enriched my life. And in honouring them, in breaking the silence of the unspoken, in unravelling the mysteries and untangling the knots they left behind, I believe their presence has enriched the lives of others’ too. 

Through my recent studies in Family Constellations, I have increasingly come to experience life as a river, flowing on with or without us. We step into its current for longer or shorter spans, mingling in the same waters where our predecessors once moved. What matters is not the length of time, but the resonance we leave behind. Not quantity, but quality.

Birth is the one beginning we all share. But our endings are as varied as our lives. Accident, chance, destiny, choice… no one can know death’s moment or manner, only its inevitability.

So was Joan’s death a tragedy as her obituaries mourned? Or was it a brilliant ending to a life lived fully right into its final breath? 

Draft for Joan’s eulogy by her sister: ‘If in another world kindred spirits dwell together there Joan & her brother Gerald will be found, I think, among a happy throng of pioneers and explorers of all ages. Courage, endurance and an indomitable will were possessed by this devoted brother and sister and both lie buried in a mountain grave & as one of her friends wrote, ‘”already halfway to Heaven”. She started on her greatest hazardous adventure joyfully and she died as she had lived, unafraid – ‘

Joan and Gerald, 1907

I dedicate this blog to my dear friend in Australia, Tas. Over the past six years, corticobasal syndrome (CBS) has been claiming his body, his movement, his speech. And yet his spirit, his humour, his integrity and his enduring delight in friends, family and life itself still blaze. To know him is both an inspiration and a gift I deeply treasure.  

Further details of my exhibition / event on Joan will follow in my next Blog.  

Following Joan… Part Two

angela findlay1 Comment

(If you are joining Joan’s story now, you might like to read ‘Following Joan… Part One’ first)

‘Goal reached, Valley of Flowers. Fritillaries nodding their heads around me. Men off.’ 

On 20th June 1939, just over four months after leaving England, 54-year-old Joan and her troop of porters reached the Valley of Flowers in the northern Indian Himalayas. 

It was ‘a morning in a thousand’. Firs and jasmine scented the air, dew drops sparkled & everyone was cheerful & happy. The track wound up and down until it suddenly dropped sheer to the river. At the bottom, the worst native bridge Joan had encountered yet stretched precariously across a particularly turbulent section. ‘If I had met it in the early days I don’t think I could have faced it.’  

Then came a real climb, so steep she had to crawl part of the way. Even with ice axe and climbing boots, she couldn’t stay upright. The path clung to the side of a mountain which plummeted several hundred feet into the raging waters below, the ground crumbly and uncertain. But she pressed on. ‘One is so busy placing feet that one hasn’t time to think of possibilities.’ 

They slid down a precipice, hanging on to rhododendron bushes, crossed another snow field, then climbed again. Ganga Ram & Amba Dath – two of Joan’s three most loyal young guides – clearly thought she was too slow. ‘Each took a hand & ran me up paying no heed if I was on my feet or not. I had to beg for mercy twice as really they nearly finished me off,’ she wrote. And then they were there. The goal reached. The Valley of Flowers.

Tents were pitched exactly where mountaineer and author Frank Smythe had camped for several months in 1937. With three men managing the camp and plans to stay there until October, Joan was free to roam and explore the terrain of her new home in search of alpine flowers. The monsoon rains were gathering. Conditions would soon become unimaginably wet and the ground increasingly treacherous. But Joan was deeply happy.

July 2nd. ‘It was the most glorious evening, every way you looked magnificent, through the gorge range upon range of perfect mountains…’ The descent from these dizzying heights, however, was less glorious. Rains had rotted much of the ground and the final stretch was so steep that she had no choice but to descend on her seat, using the ice axe as a brake. Yet Joan revelled in challenge and beauty alike, undaunted by danger, enchanted by flowers and alive to every shifting shadow. ‘All the way back to camp I had the great joy of watching the last sun on the peaks across the river, orangey pink… the rest of the snow getting white & harder, then that green when they look so severe & unapproachable.‘

That night was lovely but cold. A bright moon rose over the range, catching the snowy summits in the east. Though Joan’s camp lay in darkness, the moonlight made the mountains glow. ‘A fairy world,’ she wrote, ‘beautiful beyond words.’

July 3rd. ‘The men started singing before 5 o’clock this morning, it sounded so nice. The ground has all dried up & things are extremely lovely. If we get spells of two days fine, it will be a great help. Everything is growing very fast.

The following day, Joan was dead.

©Staffordshire History Centre

As abruptly as her life ended, her diary – so alive with wonder – skids to a halt.

Silence.

A telegram or letter from the sub-postmaster in Joshimath informed her family. Joan had slipped, fallen and died instantly. Due to the remote terrain, her body was carried back to camp and preserved in the snow until a magistrate could formally record the death. When her sister, Dossy, requested that Joan be buried in the valley, a small grave was made. A year later a headstone was erected, apparently delivered by Dossy herself.

Except that last bit has been deemed most unlikely by Dossy’s grandchildren who can find no record of their grandmother having made the long, arduous journey to India in the first year of the Second World War.

Without Joan’s detailed voice to explain what happened, conflicting accounts have taken root, a Chinese whisper of history… herstory. Was she reaching for a flower to add to her collection of specimens for Kew Gardens? Did she just slip, the edge of the cliff invisible in dense fog? For several years, I’ve tried to disentangle fact from error and in late July 2024, I and three of Joan’s descendants travelled to Ghanghariya, a colourful, bustling shanty town of damp hotels, pilgrims and donkeys, ready to make the long climb into the Valley of Flowers. The landscape might not reveal the past, but it could not lie.

Ghanghariya

We were warmly welcomed at the impressive Information Centre, honoured guests of the great-great-grandchildren of shepherds, villagers, and guides from Joan’s time each eager to share their version of what had happened to ‘Legge Ma’am’. Soon I had scribbled five different endings to Joan’s life in my little green notebook, the one that would mysteriously vanish a few days later as if to tell me: it didn’t really matter. The only truth that did, was that Joan had not been forgotten.

The next day we set off, once again retracing Joan’s footsteps, traversing the same raging river (via a slightly less terrifying bridge) and climbing the steep slopes into the valley.

Low cloud concealed Joan’s snowy ‘majesties’ and even the valley itself. Flowers, shoulder high, lined the narrow trail until a small hand-painted sign forked it and directed us to the right.

‘Leggy Grave’ could not have been more remote. With the original, broken headstone having been generously replaced by Infinity Outdoor Explorers and the area lovingly tended by villagers, Joan rested, Ophelia-like, among geraniums, potentillas and flowers whose names I don’t know. But she did.

Buried under snow for eight months of the year, this was where my intrepid great-great aunt found peace. A ‘lost daughter of the Himalayas’. And in the prophetic words of the sub-postmaster written over eight decades ago, ‘though death is inevitable, her death in a lonely forest under the tragic circumstances will always be mourned.’

While Joan lives on in the hearts and imaginations of people in northern India – many of whom have trekked miles to pay their respects – back in England, her name, her journey and her collection of flowers had all but vanished into the obscurity of family attics and forgotten archives. She entered my orbit in my twenties, a bright star that inspired independence, courage, a different way to be a woman in the world. I’ve followed her willingly, right to the edge. Imagined her fall… falling… falling… time stretching to infinity like a bungee… then snapping.

A tragic death, or an enviable end to a life well-lived? I’ll let Joan speak for herself.

‘… if we would only give up struggling after worldly things. They don’t count much when you come face to face with what the old Sardou calls the sublimity of the Himalayas whose magnificence, serenity and everlastingness grip one right to the core. You will probably think I am mad, but I don’t think so. There are things that stand and are I think increased, they are love and gratitude.’

Joan, June 1939

Forthcoming Event:

At the end of September, you are warmly invited to an exhibition/series of events showing research and art created in honour of Joan. Exact dates and details to be confirmed, but it will be in the beautiful Chapels of Rest in Stroud Cemetery.

Following Joan… Part One

angela findlay3 Comments

On 17th February 1939, Joan Margaret Legge boarded the T.S.S. Hector at Birkenhead’s Vittoria Docks and set sail for India. Surrounded by a flurry of last-minute flowers, letters and good wishes as well as Leica cameras, rolls of Kodak film and 17 packages from Fortnum & Mason, she began a four-week sea voyage that would deposit her in Mumbai. From there she would travel north by train to the Himalayan hill town of Ranikhet. And so, aged 54, began her greatest adventure.

The year before, Joan had read mountaineer Frank Smythe’s newly published book The Valley of Flowers and was so captivated by his descriptions of the majestic Himalayas that she resolved to go there herself. With the intention of adding to the collection of flower specimens Smythe had collected, she offered her services as a keen albeit amateur botanist to Kew Gardens, who willingly accepted sending her flower presses and detailed instructions on how to collect and preserve flora from the field. 

Some of Joan’s specimens from N. India in 1939, recently digitalised ©Kew Gardens

Her daily diary entries – written in tiny, meticulous script – and a remarkable collection of surviving photographs, now housed at the Stafford Archives, paint vivid scenes of rural life in northern India. As a woman navigating imperial times, Joan observed the stark poverty, the tangled legacy of British rule, and the troubling presence of Christian missionaries amid deeply rooted local faiths. Yet she did so with sensitivity and genuine curiosity, not the arrogance or entitlement so often associated with her era. She taught herself enough Hindustani to converse with those she met along the way, delighting in children, cups of tea, goats with saddle bags and botanical novelties in equal measure.

©Staffordshire History Centre

Several months of acclimatisation treks around Ranikhet gave her time to assemble a team of guides and porters and to test her equipment – tents, a canvas bath, ice axe and other supplies – in preparation for the ultimate trek to her final destination: the remote, high-altitude Bhyundar Valley, nestled just south of the Tibetan border. On May 22nd, they headed north.

31st May, 1939. Arrival at the Kuari Pass: “A very great day in one’s life”

As I have mentioned in earlier blogs, Joan was my great-great aunt on my father’s side. And last July, three other descendants and I retraced her Indian footsteps. Together with local guides who were already familiar with ‘Legge Ma’am’ as they fondly and reverently called her, we made our way to some of the same hills and valleys she once walked, recognising waterfalls, temples, holy trees, bridges and landscapes she had captured in both writing and image.

Like all pilgrimages to places of memory, her story seemed to reassemble itself in the elements around us: the humid air, the scent of pine needles crunching underfoot, the wind and monkeys dancing through the trees, the sheer drops and raging rivers, the saffron-clad pilgrims, and the fleeting glimpses of snow-covered peaks – ‘the Glories’, as Joan called them in her awe – emerging through shifting skies. As the four of us dipped our toes into the trials of that wild and beautiful land, its altitudes, its weather, its unfamiliar rhythms, her quiet courage and unflinching resilience rose steadily in our esteem.

Nilkanta 1939 ©Staffordshire History Centre
Nilkanta 2025

Joan’s story is that of an intrepid 54-year-old woman who displayed the same grit and independence as her more famous contemporaries, such as Gertrude Bell or Evelyn Cobbold. But unlike them, her path was quieter, deeply personal and largely unsung. Her modesty, her self-deprecating wit, and the sense of spiritual joy and serenity captured in her letters and journals only deepen the power of her achievement. The beauty and the tragedy of what came to pass have lifted Joan’s journey into something more than biography. It is a story that asks, gently but insistently, to be remembered. Maybe I am the last in our lineage to feel her so vividly. Maybe I am the one meant to tell it.

Vittoria Dock, Birkenhead 17.02.2025

With that in mind, on 17th February 2025, exactly 86 years after Joan set sail, I stood at Vittoria Docks in Birkenhead to symbolically wave her off. I imagined the Hector gliding down the Mersey, carrying with it not just Joan and her belongings, but the promise of new horizons and adventure. I walked beside the ghost of that ship until it reached the sea, trying to feel what she might have felt… the thrill and anxiety as she watched the landmass she called home and all that was familiar fade from view.

Daily Instagram posts: @ angela_findlay

Since that day, as some of you will know, I’ve been following Joan’s diary in real time, reenacting something she saw or did each day, capturing it through a single square photograph, posting it to Instagram, and translating it into an artistic rendition on a page in one of several dedicated sketchbooks.

Just as she did, I keep a written diary threading her life into my own. These past months have served as a reintroduction to my artistic practice, long abandoned as my brain grappled for a decade with words rather than images to write the story of my German grandfather. The process has involved an exploration of techniques in visual storytelling as I reacquaint myself with paints and brushes, scissors and glue, clay and plaster. Layers of collage stitch tenuous patterns between past and present, India and England, flowers living and long dead.

As today’s world echoes the precariousness of Joan’s, my gaze drifts over flowers and leaves, tracing their delicate lines in quiet wonder, both with my eyes and the tip of my pencil. My studio has stirred to life. And the steady rhythm of commitment and focus have birthed new creative ideas and potential collaborations.

Joan died on 4th July 1939. As that date approaches once again, I’m nearing the end of our shared journey. I will miss her – a courageous companion and inspiration. A daily reminder of a world that predated the horrors of WW2, ecological destruction, plastic waste and the proliferation of smart phones. But Joan’s story didn’t end with her death. And my telling of it doesn’t end in the fourth incomplete sketchbook.   

A Pope, a Rabbi and an 80-year-old Victory 

angela findlay3 Comments

April saw the death of the widely loved Pope Francis, the Jewish festival of Passover, and the gradual build-up to the 80th Anniversary of VE Day (Victory in Europe) in May. An unusual trio of events, yet radio coverage of all three wove threads of reflection into the tapestry of this blog. 

Compassion was central to Pope Francis’s papacy – particularly towards those who are rejected or marginalised. He often spoke about the importance of honouring and never abandoning our grandparents. “If you want to be a sign of hope, go and talk to your grandfather,” he was quoted as saying. They remind us that we share the same heritage, link us to “the beauty of being part of a much larger history… a loving plan [that] is greater than we are.” He also had the humility to say “I am a sinner,” which makes me wonder where that leaves the rest of us!

In a recent Radio 4 Thought for the Day  (at 1:47:45), Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis described Passover as the ‘Festival of Questions;’ a time to ask, to probe, to test assumptions, refine our understanding and uncover the truth. 

If we try to apply the guidance of both spiritual leaders to the forthcoming celebrations of VE Day on 8th May, we may find ourselves asking how the grandchildren of the ‘losers’ of WWII – many of whom had been perpetrators or complicit in Nazi atrocities – might ‘honour’ their grandfathers. How do you love – should you even try to love – someone who has acted immorally, abhorrently, even if those acts were sanctioned or ordered by a higher authority and deemed the right thing to do for Volk and country?

I’m all too aware how unfashionable, controversial and even provocative it is to suggest we spare a thought for the perpetrators. But in keeping with the spirit of my triangle, I am going to ask you to do just that. Many people, from all sides of the conflict, are quick to judge, blame and damn the Wehrmacht soldiers and SS as an indiscriminate mob of ‘monsters’, all morally inferior and wholly undeserving of being remembered. It’s completely understandable. But where does that leave their children and grandchildren? What happens when we continue to draw a line between the ‘good us’ and ‘bad them’, a distinction that may have served its time but no longer helps us move forward? Isn’t one of the most crucial lessons of this horrific chapter in history to recognise that most perpetrators were not monsters, but ordinary people… like you and me… who, through a slow drift of compromise, small decisions and ill judgements became capable of unimaginably heinous crimes? 

Eighty years on, with more than 88% of the German population having been born after the war’s end and a further 11% still children at the time, it’s difficult to place ‘guilt’ for the Holocaust on the Germans of today. After all, people cannot be guilty of things they themselves didn’t do. Yet, like many descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors, some non-Jewish Germans born in the decades after the war still wrestle, often unknowingly, with the unresolved trauma and guilt passed down from their parents or grandparents. They carry what Eva Hoffman aptly described as “the scars without the wound” – invisible wounds that silently shape their internal world and influence their actions in the external world. 

Without detracting anything from the horrors and suffering of the victims, can we imagine for a moment how it might be for post-war generations of Germans to live with legacies of silence, cover-ups, not-knowing, judgement, exclusion, blame or shame in relation to their roots? Mistrusting family stories. Wondering who knew and who did what. What impact does this have on individuals, families, societies, nations and ultimately, the wider world? How can one best deal with such a profound inheritance?

Primo Levi – who, as a Holocaust survivor had every right to think the opposite – declared that collective guilt does not exist. To think that it does is a relapse into Nazi ideology. Both he and Hannah Arendt made a powerful claim: “We are all to blame” for what happened. Collective responsibility is what matters. And that involves understanding how atrocities occur both in society and within the individual. How we become complicit. 

The roots of Nazism found fertile soil in the humiliation wrought by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the deeply resented ‘guilt clause’ that placed full blame for WW1 solely on Germany’s shoulders. Applying a similar dynamic to today, could there be a connection between this historical pattern and the rise of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), Germany’s nationalist far-right party — a movement fuelled in part by a desire to reassert national pride and, as encouraged by figures like Elon Musk, to move beyond what they perceive as an excessive “focus on Nazi guilt”?

The 2019 survey previously cited revealed that few Germans actually feel guilt and 70% (including 87% of AfD voters) believe their country has now sufficiently atoned for the actions of the Nazi regime. Another source revealed that 75% of young Germans (erroneously) believe they come from families of resistors, while 25% can’t name a single concentration camp or ghetto. As the number of living contemporary witnesses dwindles, disinformation, denial and delusions are spreading. With them, the sense of responsibility risks disappearing too – a deeply worrying and dangerous trend. Knowing firsthand the insidiously destructive effects of being shamed for a familial association with the Nazi era, I can understand how, eighty years on, rejecting any semblance of inherited guilt might feel like a healthy response. After all, who among us wants to feel terminally tainted by the wrongdoings of their forebears? Who wants to have to cut off their roots?

The marriage of my parents in March 1962

I feel fortunate that, while living in England with my German heritage was at times challenging, my parents and their families modelled true reconciliation throughout my life. My British father and German mother married just 17 years after the Second World War ended. Both their families had suffered and lost loved ones and/or homes under the others’ military objectives. Yet both found the courage to drop into their hearts and overcome division and enmity. And that, to me, is where the solution lies: in our hearts.

Patriotism is hollow if it is based only on pride and honour. Shame and conscience lead to a deeper bond. Seeing the world in binaries – in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them, good and bad, right and wrong – shuts down love. Reconciliation becomes impossible. As Britain celebrates its triumph over the evil forces, let us also remember we were not all good and they all bad. Among other short-comings, we too were guilty of antisemitism and of failing to help the Jews more. 

In another recent Thought for the Day, Rhidian Brook warned, “If you can’t see the other side’s humanity, you’ve lost.” 

My 80th Anniversary VE Day wish, therefore, as both a British and German citizen, is for us to follow the example set by the late Pope and Chief Rabbi: to think, to probe, to get uncomfortable, and to find compassion for individuals among the rejected and ostracised.

Eighty years on, might this be the moment to create new rituals of peacekeeping and unity? Without dampening the spirit of national joy, how can we include – and stand hand-in-hand with – our contemporary German friends in celebrations of peace, rather than reinforce historical divides?

Can we develop broader, more expansive narratives that encourage younger generations of Germans to face the difficult and painful truths of their families’ histories and to assume responsibility, not for what was done, but for what is still to be done? Can we remain vigilant against resting on any imagined moral high ground, against believing we would have undoubtedly been resistors and heroes under the Nazi regime? And can we instead recognise how thin the ice of democracy is becoming once again, and how difficult it is, even now, to change the course of history?

Events coming up:

Friday 2nd May, 12-1pm 
The Second World War 80 years on: Is Remembrance Working? 
Angela Findlay and Henry Montgomery In Conversation
National Army Museum, Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, London SW3 4HT and ONLINE
80 years on from the German surrender to the Allies, Henry Montgomery, grandson of Field Marshal Bernard ‘Monty’ Montgomery and Angela Findlay, granddaughter of General Karl von Graffen of the German Wehrmacht will reflect on their grandfathers’ roles and actions in WW2 and discuss the differences in the histories, legacies and remembrance cultures of the victors and the losers and how Remembrance can remain meaningful and effective for younger generations. 
Info and tickets (free) here. 

Thursday 8th May, 18.00 – 19.30 
Im Schatten Meines Großvaters / In My Grandfather’s Shadow
Vortrag und Gespräch / Lecture and Conversation 
Marktkirche, Hanns-Lilje-Platz, 30159 Hannover, Germany

Thursday 15th May, 17.00 – 19.00 (UK time)   43. Gesprächslabor, PAKH: The Study Group on Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust (ONLINE)? Drawing on my own experiences outlined in my book, In My Grandfather’s Shadow, we will be discussing how such a destructive legacy can be transformed into constructive, reconciliatory approaches and positive actions. More info here: https://www.pakh.de/event/gespraechslabor-40/  

Buy or read reviews on my book, In My Grandfather’s Shadow, here

Question to self: Is speaking out still the right thing to do?

angela findlay3 Comments

If you haven’t yet seen Jesse Eisenberg’s latest film, ‘A Real Pain,’ I can only urge you to do so. Starring himself and Kieran Culkin [youngest son in Succession!], the pair play two estranged cousins who travel to Poland to fulfil the wish of their recently deceased, concentration camp survivor grandmother for them to visit her former home. It’s essentially a road movie and extremely funny. But the context of the Holocaust and the attempts of third-generation Americans to come to terms with it, makes it also profoundly moving, thought-provoking and important. 

Millions of people world-wide are still grappling with the aftermath of those appalling years of Nazi rule. More, rather than fewer, stories of survivors and first-hand witnesses are coming to light told by descendants who have finally found ways to articulate what their forebears couldn’t. My own, In My Grandfather’s Shadow, published in 2022, is testament to the painful process of peeling back the layers of incredulity in which the extremes of both cruelty and suffering are wrapped. For many, it is justifiable to judge or blame ordinary Germans for not speaking out or revolting against the wrongness of what was happening in clear sight. Despite acknowledging their justified fears, it would have been the right thing to do.

As we approach Holocaust Memorial Day marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces in 1945, we are asked to remember the horrific consequences of the crimes that, in part, were enabled because people did not speak out. We will once again repeat the heartfelt ‘Never Again’ that has been chanted like a mantra over the decades. But is it enough?

“Voting right-wing is so 1933”

Across the globe, the roots and shoots of far-right policies are taking hold with renewed vigour. In highly vigilant Germany, ‘Voting right-wing is so 1933’ is a campaign slogan for left-wingers. But calling out discrimination and anti-immigrant policies, becoming an ‘upstander’ rather than a bystander has become increasingly perilous, even a danger to life. I wonder how Bishop Mariann Budde’s recent controversial sermon at the inaugural prayer service at Washington National Cathedral will play out. Referencing immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals among others, she calmly but directly asked President Trump “to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now.” Will she be cancelled, trolled, fired, discreetly removed from her post? So far she is refusing to apologise for speaking her truth. Was it brave, wise, right? Or, as he and his supporters claim, ‘nasty, woke, inappropriate’ and she a “Radical left hard line Trump hater”? Bizarre as it sounds, by seeking a path of compassion, did she inadvertently shame and dent an ego as big as the world?

As someone with (non-Jewish) German roots, I feel like it is both in my DNA and a conscious personal responsibility to speak out in the face of a perceived injustice or wrongdoing. However, I am beginning to feel an even stronger impulse. In these times of widespread latent and reactive vitriol and rage, I have started to listen into the other side’s point of view rather than – or at least before(!) – slating it. To create a tiny pause, a space between the attack and counter-attack model so many discussions rapidly descend into. It’s like stepping back from an easel when you have been immersed in some detail in order to see the whole picture. For when we speak out against something with conviction but without seeing the back story behind the other’s conviction, we are basically assuming a moral and intellectual high-ground that imparts the message that ‘they’ are wrong (inferior) and ‘we’ are right? This never goes well! Trump’s return to the White House proves that.

Decades of trying to comprehend the behaviour of ordinary Germans eighty or ninety years ago have revealed to me that many of them won’t have been so different to many of us today, i.e. more concerned with their own lives – milking cows, running businesses, keeping children warm and fed – than politics. Looking away, keeping stumm becomes a basic survival tactic. But the outrage humans feel in the face of endless discrimination, inequality, injustice, harm can rapidly turn to despondency and disaffection when we realise we can do little more than sign a petition or share a rant on social media or among friends. Eventually we might become numb, at worst immune to the wrongdoing. I know that I personally read, watch and listen to the news far less than I used to because the drip-feed of madness, badness and sadness feels toxic and induces inertia. I have no idea if this is maturity, complacency, disheartenment, a nauseating lack of humour or an equally nauseating sense of self-righteousness, but I have lost some of my more outspoken tendencies and anger at the world and replaced them with something that is hopefully more productive but still relevant to these times.

My prison work showed me that the most valuable action I could offer prisoners was to listen and to hear them. Not just their stories, excuses and justifications, but what came before. The drivers of their behaviour. With their defences down, trust, compassion and understanding could grow. Attitudes and actions quietly changed without them being shown to be wrong.

I am not sure if this is the right way to go in general life. The story of the Zen / Chinese Farmer comes to mind with its ‘We’ll see…’

It’s certainly not a quick-fix solution. But maybe it’s a tiny antidote to the constant stoking of anger? A drop towards the creation of a kinder world in which wider discourse and a greater tolerance of difference are possible. And ‘Never Again’ regains its urgency and weight. 

A few links to that don’t necessarily reflect my views, but are accessible sources to pursue your own research.

A Real Pain Review

A Real Pain Trailer

Germany’s present is not Germany’s past by Katya Hoyer

Who is Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop who angered Trump with inaugural sermon?

‘I am not going to apologise’: The Bishop who confronted Trump speaks out

Remember, Remember… we all lost

angela findlay2 Comments

‘Tis the season to remember. In our progression through the grey gloom of this autumn [just 18 minutes of sunshine since 28th October apparently!] and the celebrations of Halloween, All Souls, Samhain, Guy Fawkes and November 11th, the dead take centre stage. Leaves and forest floors redden while poppies bloom on jacket lapels, village monuments and shop counters. This Sunday in London, as on all Remembrance Sundays, red wreaths will be laid by royalties, senior politicians and Commonwealth High Commissioners before some of the last surviving WW2 veterans march or are wheeled past the Cenotaph.

We have been collectively remembering Armistice Day since 1919, the first anniversary of peace at the end of World War One. Remembrance has since been extended to both World Wars and all those who have given their lives in service to defend our freedoms. It is a hugely important day for the British, the Commonwealth and many other countries around the world, albeit not in Germany. There, since the Middle Ages, 11am on 11.11 has marked the start of the carnival season and, on a more serious note, Armistice Day is not considered to have welcomed the beginning of peace but years of intense unrest and far worse horrors to come. 

British and Commonwealth dead

I often dedicate my November blog to our traditional, deeply moving and impeccably executed rituals of remembrance, but not always without a little questioning too. Through the 15 years of research for In My Grandfather’s Shadow, I came to appreciate a far broader narrative of WW2 remembrance than that which Britain generally embraces and teaches. Granted there has been welcome progress over the decades with the inclusion of women as well as the huge contributions and sacrifices made by Gurkha, Indian, Sikh, African and Caribbean servicemen, among others. But there is still widespread ignorance of the bigger context.

Russian dead

When I give my talks, I often use statistics. They provide a solid, black and white foundation of fact to my more psychological / philosophical ponderings. So often these figures shock. For example, when I ask people to guess the total losses, including civilians, of say Russia, Germany and Britain in the Second World War they are usually so far out that they themselves are horrified. I challenge you to make a guess… I’ll put the answers at the end of the blog. One man literally went white when he realised how wrong he had been in his thinking or, by his own admission, his lack of thinking. Another woman recently wrote to tell me how my book had opened her eyes in so many ways. “First off,” she said, “the big realisation of how little I have understood of the two world wars, my ignorance of those times and the aftermath.” This despite attending remembrance services all her life. 

German dead

The quantity of deaths doesn’t mean each death was any less keenly felt. But I think she voices what is probably true of most of us. I certainly was ignorant of the broader landscape of loss and destruction, and no doubt still would be if I hadn’t had German roots that needed excavating and hadn’t made trips through Germany and Russia that exposed me to other ways of looking. The World Wars are the episode in history with which the British are often accused of being unnaturally obsessed. And yet, as a nation, we often present it as a deceptively straightforward story of good triumphing over evil. The victors write history after all. 

Every nation has its ‘chosen traumas’ and ‘chosen victories’ which serve as cornerstones to its identity and prevent true healing from the past as they continue to play out in the present. We frequently have binary views of how we should feel based on – to use the reader’s words again – “simplistic, reductionist understanding… goodies and baddies…” Rarely have we “considered what it must feel like to have a different identity…” 

I really appreciate and admire this woman’s soul-searching honesty. The humility and gentle opening to hearing the other sides’ stories gives me huge hope.   

Healing, reconciliation, peace, forgiveness… all goals we strive for within our culture of Remembrance… can best come about when we become familiar with and find some understanding for the other side’s experience. Maybe, with our greater distance from both the acute trauma and the impassioned jubilation of our forebears, that is what generations now and in the future can strive to do more of. 

Answer to my statistics question: Out of the around 60 million people killed in WW2, 26 million were Russian, approx. one third of them military and two thirds civilians. Between 7-9 million Germans died, roughly 6 million were soldiers and 3 million civilians. In the United Kingdom, just under 451,000 were killed. That’s 383,800 military, including combatants from overseas territories (Crown Colonies and the Indian Empire), and 67,200 civilians.