A 60 años de la caída nazi

El domingo pasado, cace 60 años cayó la Alemania Nazi y terminó la Segunda Guerra Mundial, una orgia de muerte que envolvió al mundo asesinando a 50 millones de muertos y ciudades y naciones en ruina. Parece tan lejano, y tan cercano como comenta Nicole - Anne Boyer acerca de ésto en Worldchanging, desde París.

"It was VE Day on Sunday, the day the Allies defeated Nazi German over 50 years ago. It's hard to wrap our heads around what it was like in May of 1945 in Europe. Winston Churchill described the collective mood the best: "a vast quivering mass of tormented, hungry, care-worn and bewildered human beings agape at the ruins of their cities and homes."

Until I moved to Paris, however, this day was an abstract event for me. Living so far away from these distant happenings -- both in time and space -- the task of trying to make tangible the cause and consequences of a war that killed 50 million people was barely possible, and quite frankly, not a top priority. The future, not yet blemished by any mistakes and mayhem, seemed a more interesting place to focus on versus the unchangeable, pockmarked past.

But the past has finally caught up to me now that I live in Europe. Indeed, it's hard to avoid, since history is so integrated and infused within daily life. You miss so much if you can't decode the artifacts of the past, densely visible in the physical and emotional architecture of places like Paris....

for in that moment, I could vividly see in a hologram in my head the dots connect between the past, present and future. No longer abstract, I could feel the physicality of this link coming out of the ground from the historic place, and in the face of the Normandy woman sitting next to me, still remembering her mother's stories of liberation. This wasn't an intellectual reckoning, the tears suddenly welling, as I felt in a new way how the destructive events fifty years ago led directly to the profoundly idealistic and optimistic founding of the EU, which, while much criticized is still one of the most important experiments in governance on this planet -- an improbable yet steadfast dog's breakfast of institutional innovations born of human folly, designed to bind historically warring peoples in peace. As the ghost's of Bosnia remind us and the rise of xenophobia demonstrates in the Netherlands and all across Europe, this peace can't be taken for granted...."

Así es , la paz no puede darse por descontada. Por eso hay que trabajar por la paz en Europa y todo el mundo todos los días, desde cada trinchera. Porque la guerra y la muerte nunca está demasiado lejos, la paz nunca debe parecernos segura, sino una algo por lo que vale la pena vivir luchando.