The sacrifices that brought us peace

Getting to know the personal stories of men and women who fought heroically during the war and died in the struggle, who went through the horrors of concentration camps, who died of starvation in the blockade, is the most important way to preserve the memory of their victims. These stories are not just important, they are necessary for our understanding of what courage, feat, sacrifice, loss are. But when it comes to a global war like World War II, the numbers can tell an equally dramatic story. Filmmaker Neil Halloran, creator of the infographic documentary The Fallen of World War II, says so. “With this project, I wanted to not just tell the story of the numbers behind the war, but to do it with soul, with the drama of a movie,” says Neil Halloran. “Statistics can also say a lot – first of all, about what mark the war left in our history, how deep a wound it inflicted on those peoples who were involved in it.”¹.

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The film also contains another important thought: awareness of the scale of the losses should help us to cherish the peaceful times in which we live more. Here is a quote from the movie:

“More people died during World War II than in any other war in human history. But if we look at the proportion of the world’s population that died during different wars, we see that there have been bloodier wars in the past. And after 1945, there was a period during which none of the largest countries was at war with another directly. Historian John Gaddis called this period the “Long Peace”. Such a period of peace between the “great powers” has not been seen since the days of the Roman Empire. Of course, there were wars after 1945 as well. But the chance of death is less than ever.

Unlike war, the state of peace is difficult to measure. It’s like counting the people who didn’t die and the wars that didn’t happen. We value the word “peace” but often neglect it. Sometimes you need to remind yourself how terrible war is in order to realize the value of a peaceful life. And the longer the Long Peace continues, the more important it becomes. So if, watching the news, we still do not understand where we are going, then referring to these numbers can help.

Fallen of World War II, directed by Neil Halloran, translated by Evgeny Shmukler

Comment by psychologist Hakob Nazaretyan:

“Indeed, we are living in the most peaceful time in the history of mankind. And even the twentieth century, which claimed the largest number of lives, is significantly inferior to the nineteenth in terms of the relative number of losses. During the Second World War, terrible violence was happening, but a shift had already taken place in the minds of people: for example, gas chambers and concentration camps were designed to hide the atrocities of Nazism, while before such “shame” was not required, and massacres were declared “the natural law of evolution” and even regarded as an inevitable consequence of “progress”. Physical violence is subject to more and more restrictions as the means of destruction become more and more powerful. When a single bomb is capable of killing millions of people, the very possibility of war becomes tantamount to mutual destruction. Therefore, in order to preserve society, we create more and more sophisticated means of deterring and regulating aggression. Violence is increasingly moving into the virtual sphere – on TV and computer screens. There is an illusion that cruelty is growing, although in fact everything is exactly the opposite. Whether this trend will continue and what it will lead to, only time will tell.”

Read more:

• What the war taught me
• Viktor Frankl: “Guilt can only be personal”
• Carl Gustav Jung: “I know demons exist”

¹ To learn more about the project and watch an interactive version of the film, visit fallen.io