Remembering WW II–70 Years Ago Today
September 1, 1939, 70 years ago today, marks the official beginning of World War II with Herr Hitler’s invasion of Poland. I am encouraging my students and any who will listen to think of someone they know in their 80s or 90s and ask them to tell what they remember of that day in 1939. Unfortunately, both my parents and my grandparents have now died, but I remember them all talking of those dark days when the world as they knew it began to come apart in ways they could not imagine until the world began picking up the pieces in the late 1940s. Even though professional historians of WW II would consider it quite dated, and even when published it was panned for being overly popular by critics, I still find William L. Shirer’s opening chapters in his monumental classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Simon & Schuster, 1960) the best account of how things “felt” in Europe, England, and America on this fated day that marks such a critical turning point in Western history.
We humans look for symbolic chronological markers, and in my field of ancient Judaism and early Christianity there are many. We speak of the “2nd Temple period” Judaism, recognizing, for both Jews and Christians, the watershed year of 70 C.E. when the Romans captured Jerusalem and much of the city, including Herod’s Temple, was burnt to destruction. There is a real sense in which the apocalyptic world which so cast the hopes and dreams of Jews (including the early Christians) in the Maccabean period (165 B.C.E.), died that day. Numerous other dates come to mind–Alexander’s defeat of Darius on June 7, 334 B.C.E. (Artemisius 28th on the Olympiad Calendar), Octavian’s defeat of Mark Anthony in 31 B.C.E., and, largely unnoticed, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth by Pontius Pilatus, prefect of Judea on April 4, 30 C.E.
But today I am thinking of 1939 and how those events surrounding WWII, that I escaped by my own birth in 1946, so definitely cast the world I have grown up in and the lives of my parents and grandparents now gone.
