There cannot be many of us left who were there on that fateful day when the last V2 rocket to land on London destroyed Hughes Mansions on Vallance Road, killing 134 people, including Jonathan Freedland’s grandmother (When a bomb falls, its impact is felt for generations. I know that from my own family’s trauma, 18 March). I lived with my parents in a council flat some 100 yards from Vallance Road – it was 8 o’clock in the morning and I was getting ready for school. The explosion was a horrendous shock; I was just 13 and had been through most of the blitz. My route to school was about 25 yards from the site. We found the best night shelter in a deep unused underground station in Whitechapel.
Like Jonathan’s family, we had our own tragedy: my father’s cousin was killed, but there was no funeral – not a single identifiable body part could be found. The trauma is seared into the memory. However, we were much better off than the Ukrainians – we did have water, electricity and rationed essentials.
Bernard Graham
Maidenhead, Berkshire
• The concluding words of Jonathan Freedland’s article – “I am the son of that terrified girl and always will be” – resonated with me, as a child of a mother born in the borderlands/bloodlands of eastern Europe who witnessed terrible atrocities from two fronts.
Freedland writes that the V2 attack that killed his grandmother “shaped my life. Because it shaped my mother’s life. It made her who she was.” The same is true of the events that my mother witnessed. War becomes part of our DNA across generations. The events taking place in Ukraine now took me back to the homes of my childhood, surrounded by refugees from the last century’s atrocities from this part of the world.
Caroline Tomiczek
London
• Thank you, Jonathan Freedland, for your courage in telling your personal story about how trauma lingers through the generations. Those of us who are the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and refugees know well how succeeding generations must do the emotional processing that the traumatised were too overwhelmed to complete. Elie Wiesel said: “They who did not go through the experience must transmit it.”
In addition to the huge amount of physical rebuilding required after this horrifically destructive episode comes to an end, there will be the need for generations and generations of emotional healing.
Judy Sherwood
Sheffield
• Jonathan Freedland refers to grainy archive photographs of the destruction caused by the V2 rocket that fell on Hughes Mansions. I also possess a grainy photograph that is a chilling reminder of the horrors of war. Mine is a picture of my father’s platoon, a group of 32 men in uniform smiling at the camera. Only three of the 32 returned home in 1945. As a boy, I could never understand why he spoke so little about his experiences, when the cinema was constantly showing films about our gallant servicemen in wartime. Only when I was an adult would he tell something of the horrors of his war. They are perhaps best explained in the words of my mother, who said he left a young man and came back home an old man whom she barely recognised.
Truth is said to be the first casualty of war, but the pictures from Ukraine demonstrate all too well its terrible truths. One benefit will be the ending of the attitude that war is something that only happens far from home and to foreign peoples. It happens here, and it’s terrible. As we have now been exposed to the horrors of war, the peoples of western Europe will be supportive of actions to stop this one. Putin must be stopped now, for the sake of future peace in Europe.
Derrick Joad
Leeds
• Thank you, Jonathan Freedland, for your very personal and very moving story, a reminder of how affronts and irredeemable loss are remembered through the generations, even when a measure of forgiveness has become possible.
The Ukrainian people will breathe again, and some wounds will eventually heal, but lessons must be learned and not forgotten. We should take a lead from your brave and dignified mother and her “deep reservoirs of empathy for the suffering of others”.
Anne Constantine
Great Gransden, Cambridgeshire
• Thank you for Jonathan Freedland’s deeply moving description of his “inherited memory” of destruction caused by a V2 rocket in London. Events in Ukraine will trigger memories we would prefer not to be awakened and, for others, memories they did not know they possessed.
I was aged five when the second world war was declared but do not have memories to match Freedland’s. Nonetheless, a feeling of fear has been aroused in the past by my reading a history of the 1940 invasion of Norway – fears I did not know I had at the time.
Memories stir. As a nation, Britain escaped invasion; Poland did not. It is no accident that it is Poland providing massive refugee assistance and that Britain is not.
James Lewis
Marshfield, South Gloucestershire
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