On holiday, I was repeatedly reminded of how little I know.  I'm not just  talking about the pub-style quizzes we enjoyed.   (How many non-US people would know what flavour a Hostess Ding Dong is?).  I'm thinking major, world-changing things.

In New York, unexpectedly, the transfer booked to take us to our hotel turned into a tour of Manhattan (hotel check-in times apparently inspired this seemingly generous gesture).     I hadn't intended to visit the site of the former World Trade Centre (or Ground Zero) during my trip.  This is partly because I find it too distressing, partly because I feel uncomfortable about tragedies such as 9/11 or the Titanic becoming part of a tourist/entertainment itinerary and partly because a year before 9/11, I visited the World Trade Centre's  Observation Floor, 110 storeys high, and still feel ill whenever I recall the sheer height and inaccessibiliy of the building.   However, the tour spent most of the morning there, and our guide recounted at length the tragic events and subsequent losses.   Even our lunch was scheduled to take place in a deli overlooking the site.  It was very, very distressing. 

We shared our lunch table with an 80 year old Belgian woman and her two daughters, who insisted that the guide joined us.   And during the conversation, one of the Belgians articulated 'Yes, it is very  sad what happened here, but it needs to be put in perspective.  It is nothing when compared with the bombing of Dresden during the second world war."

I felt rather ashamed at this point, because although I know about the bombing of Dresden, and the controversy it caused it, I had no idea of the extent of the fatalities.  So I looked it up, and discovered that about 25,000 lives were estimated to have been lost.  Then, to my astonishment, I learned that Operation Gomorrah, a similar fire-bombing offensive of Hamburg, caused at least 50,000 deaths and one million homeless. 

The guide turned to the elderly Belgian lady and asked 'You lived through it.  Do you hate the Germans for what they did?"  And she and her daughters were truly astounded.  'No!" They said.  'We just feel very sad that the world did not learn from that time"

I couldn't put it better myself.