When a bomb falls, its impact is felt for generations

Mar 18th 2022 The Guardian

Jonathan Freedland writes about the inherited memory of war.

When a bomb falls, its impact is felt for generations. I know that from my own family’s trauma

Every time I look at the pictures of Mariupol or Kharkiv, I see a corner of Whitechapel in east London. I reacted the same way to images of Aleppo and, before that, Falluja and, before that, Grozny, because buildings crushed to rubble have a sad habit of looking the same. It brings back a memory – or rather something fainter: an inherited memory, one that was passed to me.