There but for the sweep of history......am I, born in Paris of second generation immigrant parents, just after the end of World War II. Well perhaps not.
My grandmother and grandfather made the difficult journey over land from Russia to France in the early twentieth century, looking for a better life. Despite rudimentary living conditions and tough piece-work sewing fur pelts together into coats, my fourteen year-old grandmother apparently adored the French capital. She learned to prepare French dishes, sew beautifully, enjoy the beauty of an incredible city and live the life Parisian, wheeling her baby girl, my aunt, through the Jardins de Luxembourg, singing her French lullabies at night.
At the urging of relatives, the young family decided to join them in the US until the war was over. In 1915 they were certain it would be over within a year and they could return to Paris. My grandfather, having already been forced to serve for years in the Czar's army was not about to join another one.
If it hadn't been for the Great War, I might have been born French.
But then with deportations in World War II my mother might not have survived and I'd never have been born.
If Archduke Franz Ferdinand's coach hadn't (unpredictably) gone down the street where Gavrilo Princip was lurking, the murders might not have taken place, and no Great War.
'Ifs' are debatable, but the terrible events of the Great War are not.
And the rest is history? Well not exactly.
"Despite his message of goodwill, Komsic presides over only a part of an ethnically divided city. Nineteen years after the war ended, Bosnia operates as two "entities", the predominantly Muslim and Croat Federation, and the overwhelmingly Serb-dominated Serb Republic (RS). The highly autonomous RS was recognised by the peace settlement. Many Muslims regard it as the product of ethnic cleansing, while for Serbs its existence is a guarantor of peace.
Swaths of the capital lie in the RS, where the administration of Istocno (east) Sarajevo operates separately, the two not even joined by public transport. In emergency cases, citizens of Istocno Sarajevo cannot be treated in the city centre's general hospital, Komsic notes, instead having to be taken 120 miles to Banja Luka, the capital of the RS."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/gavrilo-princip-sarajevo-divided-archduke-franz-ferdinand-assassinationThe above article describes the great divisions within contemporary Sarajevo and the country as a whole. Princip as a revered and actively commemorated hero / Princip as a wild criminal who unleashed hell on the world.
Divided passions survive intact into the twenty-first century, fester and divide communities, cities, countries. Sarajevo is scarred, Bosnia is divided.
I never met my grandmother. She died young in Philadelphia in 1934.
My mother, her second daughter, left America for Europe in 1945, and worked with the Red Cross in Greece, then in Geneva.
My mother died peacefully six years ago to the day at the age of 90 only three miles from the French border.
You could say she was fortunate. She was born in the US at the end of the Great War. She did not suffer during the Second World War. She lived in Europe in a time of relative peace. The Europe her own mother had loved. The gorgeous flowers and bushes she cultivated in her country garden and her love of birds were intense expressions of beauty.
But she carried within her the collective memory of pogroms, the deaths from typhus, the struggle of immigration and poverty and the death of a young mother. She talked about this only occasionally, but her emotional struggle was patent.
My mother bore this history within her her whole life.
