My grandfather, born in 1922, was one of the many boys torn from the fields and shipped off to the front. To Algeria.
Imagine for a moment having rarely seen, in your whole life, a vehicle of any kind, and suddenly having to travel by train, then by lorry, then across the Mediterranean escorted by fighter planes. Then, once ashore, being thrown onto the front line in the most brutal phase of the fighting. Add a couple of years as a prisoner, and finally the return to a normality made of sacrifice and poverty.
I think this profile — shared by a great many of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers — deserves at the very least to be studied and understood, as an act of respect and gratitude. And there's one detail that changes the perception of it entirely: those events cut across the lives of millions of people all over the world, and they concern us closely, because from that generation to mine only three have passed.
I felt the need to understand not history itself, but what my forebears had to endure passively because of it. I pictured that period as a pond into which, at a certain point, a stone entered — with such speed and force that it stirred the water into a whirl of violent, unceasing ripples. Those ripples are the chaos in the lives of everyone who lived through those dark years.
Churchill and Odachi occupy two different positions in relation to that stone: the one who tried to stop it, and the one who took the force of the wave, even though it was his own people who had thrown it.
Kazuo Ōdachi enlisted in 1943, at sixteen, in the air arm of the Imperial Japanese Navy, dreaming of becoming a fighter pilot. A year later they assigned him to the tokkōtai, the special attack unit: the kamikaze. He kept that story to himself for more than seventy years before telling it in Memoirs of a Kamikaze.
And this is where the difference matters more than the likeness. My grandfather was taken. Odachi volunteered, chasing a dream, and was told that the dream would end against the side of a ship.
Stop for a moment and try to remember yourself at sixteen. Now try to imagine having to learn to fly an aircraft of that era — entirely manual, entirely analogue — knowing that the job allows for only one ending.
As an adult, Odachi was labelled too hard, too severe. But he had lived an experience at the limit, with death ready to take him at any instant, at sixteen. His hardness towards the young came from seeing around him a short-sighted way of living, one that had already forgotten the sea of tears and blood spilled a few decades earlier. It is the fate of almost everyone like him: to come back from something of that kind and find a society that stopped remembering too soon the sacrifice of those who laid the ground for its rebuilding.
Churchill saw death and war on a different plane from Odachi. Not necessarily a higher one. He led a nation and a people above all through charisma and leadership, and death was a possible consequence — direct or unforeseen — of that leadership: present in his life too, but in another way. The bombs fell on London as well, and his journeys by air and by sea were a constant risk. But what leaves its mark, above all, is the making of decisions that moved thousands of men through the uncertainty of the battlefield.
I believe we all have an inheritance to take up, left to us by our grandparents and great-grandparents, and that this inheritance is the duty to remember their sacrifice. It isn't rhetoric: it's a measure. If for a moment we set aside our daily trivialities and think of the hardness of their lives, many of the problems that look insurmountable to us turn out to be exactly what they are.
Some have tried to pay that debt with the body. In 1997, while the Balkans were still at war, Marina Abramović spent four days sitting on a pile of bones, cleaning them one by one — herself the daughter of two people who had fought the war before that one. The blood did not come off. It never comes off. That is exactly the point.
My grandfather had seen death on the battlefield and had known imprisonment. And yet he managed to give me immense love. It's the thing about him I understand least, and the only one that really matters.
The stone in the pond had been thrown by others. Putting the water back in order fell to them, and he did it in the only way left to him.
