Hidden Chapters Of History

War is quite an unpleasant topic to talk about, the amount of innocent people that lost their lives just makes you think, is it really worth it, and the short answer is no; but if you can get past the tragic side, war is a fascinating topic, especially World War II. The Second World War brought great consequences, ones we can notice such as new borders and changes in the way our countries are ruled, but arguably the largest consequences are the things that we cannot see. 

Over the past few weeks in the Performance Learning Program, the grade 10 cohort has investigated the importance of stories in understanding and answering the driving question: How might we use stories to better understand the causes and consequences of WWII? This question would be answered in a class podcast series where each student would talk you through their own topic of interest. This is quite a difficult question so to help us get to an answer we’d read a novel about the Second World War and connect it to our own podcast topic. 

As I stated in my learning plan and said in my mPOL, I wanted to push myself this year, so when it came to choosing a novel I got out of my comfort zone and picked the most advanced one which is “All The Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr. Quickly on I realized that this was going to be a challenge, I’ve said many a time reading isn’t my cup of, tea so when I realized I had to read about 100 pages in just a few days, I can’t lie, I wasn’t feeling confident. However, I actually found this book quite interesting, I like how it was told from two different perspectives, it really helped break up the book and gave me a better understanding of the war. A section of this project that I felt really got me to my end product was our book chats, although I had my understanding of the novel hearing what four other people think just made me build more connections and have a deeper understanding. 

There were many different topics in the novel and I couldn’t choose what I’d want my podcast to be focused on, I was debating between planes and the aerial war and the family side and even radios and communication during the war. With the help of my teacher I was really proud of my topic and thought it was very unique. I decided to go with the family route and bring in my personal connections. I knew I wanted to speak a bit about my grandfather and his experience. When I was young I was told that my great grandfather was in the war and ever since then I’ve been interested in it, and one of my goals was to be more of myself in my work, so this topic allows me to do just that. Since my brother had just been with my grandpa for a couple of months, he was told the complete story of how he was impacted by the war, so I spent a lot of time talking with my brother and he told me what had actually happened. I never knew the details but after finding out I was shocked. His story is so unique and inspiring that I wish I knew it much earlier in my life. 

When it came to writing my script it brought a lot of struggle, I knew that I wanted to include my grandpa’s experience because it’s too fascinating not to, but the hard part was actually showing that I understand World War II. I had to find a way to connect my personal side with the straight up facts, and this is what proved to be difficult. My first draft was a fail, there’s no denying it, when I brought my script into class for peer critique, all I had was a biography of my grandpa and great grandfather. But to be honest, this was what I needed, this fail brought along great ideas from my peers and really set me up in the right direction. Using this feedback I revised it until it got to the point where I was happy with it. I had a lot of stuff that I needed to manage during the back end of this project, and now looking back I can proudly say that I didn’t let that stuff be in control and produced quality work and work that will help me reach my learning plan goal.

At the end of all this work I was able to come up with an answer, we can use stories of personal experiences to understand that everyone is impacted in some way, and how these impacts are still here today. We learn from these real-life experiences and put them into perspective so we don’t repeat the same thing again. World War II is a very complicated thing, all war is but hearing these stories, especially the one of my grandpa has helped me understand it. I never felt that connected to war, but once you have a personal experience that connection strengthens and changes your view of life. There are so many stories from World War II that haven’t been told and it’s a real shame, these stories give purpose to people and life in general and without them, there is so much unknown. In the moment you might not think your story is important or worth sharing, but years down the line that same story could impact the world in unthinkable ways. 

A lot has been learnt in this project, from learning about the war itself to learning about myself, this project was one of my favourites. At the end of the day, war is a gruesome and sensitive subject but it also has given me a new look on things. These stories are ones that I’ll never forget and I hope you can do the same.