War Wounds the Grandchildren

I read the headline and scrolled past the photo in the news this morning, of a Ukrainian family killed by a Russian mortar, because I knew it would hit me too hard, but then I started reading the article and started sobbing anyway.

The traumas of war last for generations. The Syrians, the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Ukrainians, and the Russian soldiers will live with this for the rest of their lives, and pass it on to children and grandchildren. 

I know this because my mother was born in East Prussia in 1939. Her father was a soldier who served throughout World War II (yes, on the German side) and was killed in March 1945. She and her family fled East Prussian for what became West Germany in late 1944, spending time in a refugee camp, traveling by horse-drawn carriage (because the army had appropriated all the motor vehicles), at night, when they were less likely to be bombed or shot. 

The stories have been spilling out of the various siblings and cousins recently. One lives in Australia now, two in the US, others in Frankfurt and Munich, but in their minds they are back in early childhood, recalling the bombings and gunfire and fear. 

Children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors know this story well. 

So much fear. 

Fear passed to me as a child by my mother's stories. Fear passed another generation to my son, who as a first-year college student is worried for his friends doing ROTC, and even that he might get called to fight. Fear passed through my mother's stories, and also undoubtedly from me directly, though I couldn't tell you exactly how. 

And the wounds of the war going on in Ukraine right now will be carried into the future by the children. 

A million children are among those who have fled the country. They may return, they may have to make lives elsewhere. 

Either way, they will be scarred, and so will their children, and their children's children.