Workers start to clear school desks out from classrooms after an overnight rocket attack of School No. 16 which was empty at the time of the attack, in July, 2023 in Kostyantynivka, Donetsk District, Ukraine.Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
Nathan M. Greenfield is a military historian and author.
In mid-July, I received an e-mail from one of my students. Since June, I have taught a course, via Zoom, in the Kyiv School of Economics Memory and Conflict Studies MA program called “Issues in Public Memorization of War: Who Gets to Tell History?”
“Your teaching us this week,” she wrote, “helped me to stay strong, helped me deal with Russian aggression in different [ie, new] ways.”
I was flattered to think that a lecture could do anything to help her persevere through a week that saw some of the heaviest missile and drone attacks on Kyiv in the war, but I knew she vastly overstated my role – it was she and her classmates who did the heavy lifting.
Take, for instance, the class I taught on June 17. During a lecture on First World War memorials in Vimy, Ottawa and Ypres, suddenly I saw the 16 faces peering at me stiffen. For a moment, I feared that my strong Brooklyn accent and penchant for speaking very quickly had gotten beyond my students’ English – their third, fourth or fifth language. Or I had said something hurtful, always a concern since the course material is rawly personal for them.
“It was only an air alarm,” said one student, while another told me, “We’re just figuring out how close the alarm is.”
My entreaty that they run for shelter was firmly rebuffed, causing the tension in my neck to increase as I sat safely in my Ottawa home. “There’s no need for that,” I was told. “Dr. Greenfield, please go on.”
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Their classrooms and homes are anything but safe spaces, and the material both I and they brought to the class was especially fraught. How could it not be when the words of Homer we studied – “And the dark blood gushed forth from the wound, and his life flew from his limbs” – could be what a student read in a letter telling of a husband’s, brother’s, cousin’s or friend’s last moments? A student’s voice wavered but did not break when discussing a painting of a medieval siege that cut close to so many news reports of Russian attacks. Nor did my students shrink from discussing clearly and calmly the aestheticization – even glorification – of the sine qua non of war: destruction and horrifying deaths of civilians and soldiers, people their own ages.
In an essay on Peter Paul Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, for example, one student wrote that he did “not aim to create a reconstruction of events, but rather to convey their essence. Rubens, for example, depicts violence as deeply corporeal, physical, and intimate. Muscular warriors tear out the defenceless bodies of children and kill them in front of helpless mothers, whose corporeality accentuates their broken dignity.”
This reading of Rubens went far beyond my expectations. We had discussed the Russian soldiers’ massacre of as many as 2,700 men, women, and children in Bucha, 33 kilometres northwest of Kyiv, in March of 2022, so the author did not have to underscore the link. It was, however, present. Here and in other essays and points raised in class discussions, I saw how their daily experience of the war, combined with memories and memorials of past wars, resulted in vibrant interpretations.
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Teaching this course, I’ve learned an important truth about education, one obscured by today’s endless budgetary and ideological battles. One of the lines dividing merely existing as a hominoid, and being fully human, is taking your place in the intellectual (for lack of a better word) tradition of your culture and of mankind.
Long have we seen such examples. Seven weeks after an atomic bomb devastated Hiroshima, killing as many as 80,000 people instantly, schools began reopening; even while breathing human smoke, prisoners in German concentration camps organized clandestine schools, with famed professors teaching children; the starved Canadian and allied POWs used as slave labour for Imperial Japan ran schools in their camps.
For my students, taking their place meant, of course, learning a bunch of facts about how we remember conflict. For example, the artistic decisions embodied in the Menin Gate, where 54,395 names, including of almost 7,000 Canadians, are chiselled into white granite, commemorating those who died between 1914 and 1918 in Ypres but have “No Known Grave.”
In practice that meant, as a student put it: “I am aware that the answer to such a profound question as, ‘For whom exactly [should] this or that memorial be created?’ frequently changes to answering another question – ‘Should we pay our respect to such and such human beings’?”
These students showed me that while the chemical reactions that cause Shahed drone explosions may be powerful, for people, the real alchemy is using their education to build, however tentatively, a vision of a future where memorials help process their and their country’s pain.