Vimy, Reading, and Teaching Myself

I have a bizarre love of history from around WWI to present. The modern conflicts that have made the world we live in today the way it is engross me. My Dad has always talked about the Battle of Vimy Ridge because his Great-Grandfather died there. Him and I are planning to visit there together in a couple years because it is a place that I would really like to see.

Grade 7 was when I realized that i loved history. I read a book that I did not fully understand and it impacted me for the rest of my life. That book was Vimy by Pierre Berton. Reading it at a young age was painful, but I inflicted myself with the pain and finished it, becoming fascinated with WWI history in the process. How could this happen? How could the world fall into such turmoil? I have learned some of those answers at university but the lingering question still remains to me, who were the people who fought and what are their stories?

I have learned more of those stories through reading books like Unlikely Soldiers by Jonathan Vance and Fighting in Hell (about WWII on the Eastern Front). These books helped paint a picture of the people who fought. I cannot understand why we do not learn about the Eastern Front in history because without the Soviet Red Army, the world would probably look a lot different today.

I have also learned about many atrocities that have occurred without little public education: The Armenian Genocide (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/headline/article15530249/), the Night of the Broken Glass in Germany and Austria, the rapping of women by Japanese Soldiers during the war in the Pacific and numerous other brutalities that have occurred (hopefully the Canadian Museum of Human Rights will feature these). This is why reading history is important to me. I cannot say that I know the whole story, ever. The idea that educating everything to make Canada look good is a bad one. You have to see the world through someone else's eyes at some point. The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas is an excellent story for this reason, you see through the enemies eyes.

I do not know if I would have fallen in love with history to the same extent that I did if I hadn't read Vimy in grade 7. I'm glad that I will never know because I have a stack of books to read and most of them are historical non-fiction.