A Tale of Survival
Memory, history, and demographics all play a role in a person’s understanding of the world. For the first years of the baby boomer generation, only a few years separate history from memory in the case of World War II. I am such an early baby boomer. Although born in California and raised during the 1950s in the greater Washington D. C. area, I never heard my dad or any of his peers (virtually all the males of which were veterans) talk about the then- recent war.
As a child, even as a young adult, World War II seemed ancient history to me: not something having an influence on my life. That is a fluke of my childhood memory. To get a very different perspective on memory and history of the war, you can’t do better than to read, A Tale of Survival: From War-Ravaged Europe To The Promise of America by Tom Kando.
Tom was born in Hungary in 1941. As such his earliest memories occurred right in the middle of the conflict. He and his family experienced German and Russian invasions before fleeing to France. Thus Tom spent the 1950s in post-war-torn France (a far cry from my suburban D.C. world). Tom later moved to Holland before coming alone to this country as a Fulbright Scholar.
Kando has had an amazing life according to his book which straddles the line between memoir and historical fiction. Whether true or imagined, the first portion of the book does an amazing job of bringing to light the sensibilities of a bright child in that time and place. Kando shows how a young boy idealized his beautiful and talented parents, how he resented his younger siblings, and how a child experienced the reality of foreign soldiers occupying his home (not just his country). I’d never thought about the difficulties of growing up in Europe right after the war. Kando does a wonderful job of revealing events though the eyes of a gifted and insightful child.
The story continues in America during the 1960s nearly to the present. Perhaps because some of that time and place is familiar territory, I found it less compelling. But, for me, the insight into Europe during and after the war seen by someone fairly close to my age was priceless.
