Victory In Europe

My mother and father lived through WW2 – my mother as an Irish immigrant girl evacuated away from her family in London to the countryside in Britain, and my father served in the British Army Intelligence Corps in Dunkirk, North Africa, Italy among other places.

My mother remembers the first celebrations, but she doesn’t speak of it or the war very often. She talks often of the period just after the war, when she met her first husband (a German POW working in rural England) and her travels around a reconstructed Germany. This was her early adulthood, and amid the ruins everyone, her generation especially, was building a new life.

My father (who met my mother many years later in Berlin) had many amusing and occasionally terrifying stories from the war. A common theme would be the way that something awful could happen at any moment, without warning. But also that people would come together, often without a shared language, to work around those situations. A few drinks didn’t go amiss either.

Neither of them went in for annual VE Day celebrations. They just wanted to move on.

I have mixed feelings about today’s celebrations in the UK. What is there to celebrate? A huge death toll? I can’t blame anyone for wanting to party at a time like this, but if I had to pick a lesson for VE Day it’s that international cooperation, no matter how flawed, will beat a common enemy. Alas the UK has singularly failed in this regard, and the jingoistic tenor shows that that lesson hasn’t sunk in. The Daily Mail called it the Victory Over Europe.

So for me, VE Day will come when we’ve beaten this virus, and not just in Europe.