Several years ago, I worked with a woman who had been a child in Dusseldorf Germany in WWII. Her father had been called into the German military; my friend, her sister, brother, mother and grandmother shared an apartment in his absence. Elise (not her real name) told me that when the air-raid sirens sounded, her family would immediately leave their second floor apartment and run to a shelter down the street. The commotion and excitement seemed silly to the young Elise, for although her family heard the explosions in the distance, they only sounded like a strange and exceptionally loud thunderstorm.

One night the sirens sounded. Her mother and grandmother awakened the children again and ran to the shelter. When they arrived, her grandmother realized she had left her purse, which contained all of her identification papers, in the apartment. As the rest of her small family huddled in the doorway my friend watched her grandmother run back up the street and into their nearby apartment building. They listened to a plane passing overhead and then they saw the explosion as a bomb fell on their building. My friend’s mother screamed in horror. At first, the children didn’t know why. Then, as the fire shot out of the building, they began to understand.

Thirty years later, this was as far as my friend could go with the story. Still the memory was vivid and horrible. When she told me the story, I realized how fortunate I was to be an American and to live in a country where, although we have sent our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters into war, the war itself has never touched our shores.

Grief is a strong catalyst for vengeful anger. I hope though, that we are a strong enough people to let our minds and not our emotions govern our actions. Whenever anger starts to take hold of my reason, I visualize a young woman and her three small children huddled in a doorway as an allied bomber dropped an indiscriminate weapon on her mother. I think, “There, but for the grace of God, go I,” and I pray that God not only sheds His grace on America, but on the entire world.

War Story by Linda Jenkinson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.