Writer's Block: Hello, World!

[mlknchz]

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Watching JFK's funeral. I would have been about 2 years old. I didn't know what was happening, but I remember the room the TV was in, and seeing my sisters and mom crying. It was their crying that made it memorable.

Comments

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

I remember, my parents being deeply moved by having seen the son of the U.S. president saluting the coffin of his father passing him by (I later saw it myself on TV and had the same reaction).
We didn´t have a TV at the time, my parents, who had thought, JFK would change the world into a better one, saw it at our favourite befriended swedish neighbour´s house.
My mother always told me, I couldn´t possibly remember that.
But I did and do.
Just as well as holding on to her shivering hand at passing the inner-german border when I must have been about 2&1/2 yrs old (I have checked on that, through looking at the exact death date of my grandfather on his tomb).
We came over before he died, my mother, sister, brother who was a baby on her arm and me. The near death of her father was why she had taken on such an at the time dangerous trip, with her three small children to have a chance to see him before he passed away, my father staying in then West-Germany, to be able to get us out via media in case we should get caught, because at the time, my parents were registered as "traitors" to their previous country: the GDR for having taken the liberty to leave it as the free persons they considered themselves as human beings, to raise people like me in freedom and democracy in Sweden, instead.
You do remember these things; your parents deeply moved, crying, when relatives with children had been found dead in their appartment (apparently a gas "accident"...they were about to leave, too) and you don´t forget the hand of your mother shakingk, when she holds on to yours instead of the other way around and I can still remember exactly, looking up at her in awe, at for the first time crossing the border she had fled, in danger of death.
People equipped with weapons aiming at their own people passing by.

[mlknchz.livejournal.com]

Your mother was a remarkable woman, I can see where you get your strength of character.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Well, that is an underestimation of sorts;) but still true. In case I have anything of the kind (thank you so much for a real compliment), it does come from two sources, though: My father had quite a few things to stand straight for and despite of, even as a boy, too. I even think, this is how they found each other despite being the allegedly most beautiful couple of the Altmark at the time;) I am glad to have had them, both, as my parents. Others have their strangely similar memories from other countries, borders, wars. One would like to hope, it would be possible to concentrate on something constructive, instead, wouldn´t one? But, as I think the historian Ranke said: we can only try and see, how it truly was... and then there´s the famous quote about how a people not aware of its history, doesn´t have a future. Acknowledging how it has been, without dodging for truth, might give us all that oppportunity, still.