The savage Russian invasion of Ukraine has called a distracted and divided world back to the basics of life and death.
I was born in September 1939, three weeks after Hitler invaded Poland. My earliest memories kick in around the time that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They are memories of the home front in World War II: of blackout curtains at night and rationing and my young uncles going off to war, to Anzio, Normandy, Patton’s Third Army. In living room windows in houses up and down Mount Pleasant Street, we saw little flags with white stars or gold stars on them. They meant that a son or brother or husband was in the service (white) or was dead (gold). I remember the front pages of the Washington Post and the Times–Herald and the Evening Star on the day after the bomb fell on Hiroshima; I have the clearest memory of the inky black headlines and of the photograph of an explosion shaped like an immense mushroom against a flawless blue sky.
