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This month, we are celebrating Black History. It is a great opportunity to learn or to deepen your knowledge about the African-American history and community. It is also a great opportunity to learn or to deepen your knowledge about the history of your country.
To me, History is one of the most important subject you get to study at school. You need to study your past if you want to change your future. To quote Winston Churchill: “A nation that forgets its past has no future”.
Understanding that learning about your history is not about making any one person or people group feel guilty. You cannot be guilty of actions that took place before you were born. But you can be guilty for remaining ignorant and not learning about your history and then repeating the same mistakes as your ancestors. This is why History is so important. We need to learn about our past so we can avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.
Most of you know I am French. Some of you know that my mom is German. My grand-parents were born in Germany during World War I, and they survived WWII. My grand-father was an officer in the Wehrmacht, the regular German army, during WWII. He had to serve his country like all the men of his age. I tried to speak with my grand-parents about their life in Germany during the war. But they never wanted to tell me much about it. My mom was born in Germany in 1949, 4 years after the end of WWII. As a student in school, she had to learn about the 3rd Reich and the rise of Adolf Hitler. She had to study how her country declared war on Europe and then the world, and about the millions of Jewish people who were exterminated during the Holocaust. As a student in Germany nowadays, you keep learning about the 3rd Reich. This is not meant to make you feel guilty. It is to be learned as a cautionary tale, so people remember that a dictatorship can arise in any country anytime and, if we are not careful, History can repeat itself.
