We are all familiar of the connotative difference between the words house and home. There is a sense of safety, love, and comfort in the word home which “house” lacks.But what happens when the place that you considered home has been destroyed? Whether or not you were there to witness its destruction, the loss of this place can be devastating. Now imagine that your former home was destroyed amid a conflict involving several countries and the loss of thousands of lives.
A documentary that we watched in my Literary Responses to War and Peace class, called Surviving Auschwitz, dealt with this idea. The majority of the film followed two women who were young children during WWII and survived the infamous Auschwitz as they returned for the first time to the camp and also to the places they had lived before being taken away. While the two women walked through an apartment they had briefly called home, you could see their memory flashing back to their early years. These small rooms were supposed to be a safe place while outside a world of violence and death waited for them. One of the women mentioned that even though she was too young to remember much from the time that they lived there, she could distinctly remember the sound of boots and marching outside. The conflict of a sense of home and the anxious and uncertain feelings that have removed any level of safety this place could have held for either women, even though they have been gone for so long.
This loss of home is addressed in a blog that I’ve been reading lately. It is written by a young mother of 3 living in Iraq. In one post she writes about going back to her parent’s house where she grew up in Baghdad. She writes,
BUT seeing Baghdad in such a strange environment, seeing strange faces wearing black, having strange traditions that I had never seen in the place where I was born, all that ruined my happiness. Besides seeing our neighborhood there almost empty from the previous residents broke my heart and I couldn’t accept the new situation.”
Because of the violence in the country she no longer recognizes the place that she grew up as what was once her home. So even those these women did not live in the same regior or time frame their sense of home was still take away from them because of the presence of wartime environment.
