Manhattan's janus children, transitional era boomers born 1940-1956

I am a member of the transitional era boomer generation (born 1940-1956) : we historical few who experienced both the waning of modernity and the dawning of postmodernity during our crucial - plastic - formative years.

Very few of us were born in Manhattan (very few people ever are) but we were all Manhattan's janus children in a very real sense : the healthiest and most frightened generation of children ever born.

Manhattan '45 : Janus year (on the Janus campus) in the Janus city

Ah, yes the year 1945 : it was the best of times , it was the worst of times.

It just all very much depended on who you chose to listen to.

1945 was a triumph for modernity AND postmodernity

And that can't possibly be !

It would be as if Matter and Anti-Matter went through a revolving door together and yet both emerged equally triumphant.

1945's apogee of Modern science , Big science, Synthetic science : Zyklon-B, Plutonium, Napalm , DDT , Freon and leaded gas

Wow ! Quite a lot for Big Science (particularly chemists and synthetic scientists) to celebrate in 1945.

Set against that , a bit of a minor and undoubtedly temporary disappointment.

For there was (also in 1945) the totally unexpected failure by a thousand of the smartest guys in the room - nay the entire universe - to quickly synthesize the simple small molecule made by some small and extremely simple beings : penicillin.

Flash forward Gordon to 2015.

WWII : pure science collides with impure reality

If anyone learned the key science lesson of WWII, it wasn't the adults of the day.

Rather that science lesson was partially absorbed by children born in 1938 and afterwards , children too young to share the glow most in the Allied world felt about the supposed leading role science played in defeating the Axis.

I say partially because wartime science was generally blamed by these young people only for deliberately  promising and then succeeding in killing as many people as it possibly could possible , particularly killing as many civilians as possible.

When its actual biggest scientific and moral failures were for what it promised both sides during the war but then didn't deliver.

Sins of omission rather than sins of commission.

So bad efficient science merely replaces good efficient science in the baby-boomer academics' eyes, when a more accurate and devastating charge is to say pure science was, and is always, overwhelming inefficient.

As it must be, as long as it continues to deny that reality is inevitably and invariably dirty , mixed , intermingled and impure.....

1945 : annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for Scientism ?

I have always been fascinated by the Janus-like nature of the year 1945 in its relationship to Science and the undue worship thereof.

1945 was the year that it was widely admitted that it was only the Allies' mild-mannered/white-coated men of modern science who had bested the superior combat skills of the jackbooted henchmen of the Axis and so won the war for humanity.

A good year for Scientism.

But 1945 was also the year that we now conventionally mark the start of post-modern science... and hence marks the end of modern science.

Surely then a bad year for Scientism.

Clearly we have two views on the alleged success of modern science in 1945 - one made at the time and still held firmly by elderly academics and citizens and another made forty years later and just as firmly held by young academics.

One credits it for ending the war on behalf of the morally right side and the other blames it for starting the war and behaving so beastly during it.

All Life is Family , part one and two, explores why it was possible for most of the modernist audience of 1945 not to see the many failings of wartime science on both sides, technical as well as moral, running from 1939 through to war's end.

And why historians ever since have repeated this initial error.

The war is simply never broken out of its narrative mode to present the predictions that each and every participant had made at a particular point in time together with an assessment of whether those predictions came to pass.

Who, for example, predicted that Hitler won't conquer Moscow within four months after June 1941 ?

No one that I am aware of, as Stalin himself soon had his doubts about this capitol's survival - some military 'experts' even publicly ventured that Moscow would fall in mere weeks not months !

Predictions proved about as inaccurate during WWII as they had all throughout history - only this time they were pressed forward with the strong claim that they were backed by the best science.

If so, the best science was wrong, over and over and over for six long years.

And if "All Life is Family" is the first to say so, so be it .....

All life is family : science at War (1939-1945) with reality

During the era of modernity, 1870s- 1960s , politics was science and science was politics , both united around the idea that ultimately physical reality was really quite simple and so should human reality be.

Simple, pure, few/big,slow to change, predictable.

Modernity and its science had never had a war where it could show its stuff, earlier wars being run by the old men who grew up before scienticism replaced religion.

Now there were old men running this war who were teenagers when scienticism was in its fullest flower.

Let the games begin !

But their best laid plans were soon burnt out shells and nobody survived WWII with their predictions intact, as the actual complexity of reality confounded the mightiest and wisest over and over.

Supposedly 1945 marked the apogee of modernist science, winning the war for the Allies etc ( insert A bomb and penicillin here).

In fact it was its nadir , the birthdate of post-modernity , post-modern science ...

1945's choices : the Modern exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz or the post Modern values that gave us 'Public Domain' penicillin ?

In early 1945, two Manhattan doctors had dueling visions of the possible world ahead.

The prominent one, Foster Kennedy ,  wanted to kill all babies with developmental issues.

The unknown other, Henry Dawson, wanted all babies in the world to have access to cheap, abundant (Public Domain) penicillin.

By the end of 1945, the unknown Dawson was dead but - perhaps surprisingly - his idea lived on after him.


Because, with the beginnings of  public revulsion over the revelations of Auschwitz doctors and children coming out of the Nuremberg trials, it was clear that Dawson had won most of the educated public over to his vision.

And this only a few years after public polls indicated that the majority of the educated public favoured Foster Kennedy's murderous proposals instead.

Dawson's unstinting efforts to make wartime penicillin truly inclusive had greatly shortened his life, but clearly they hadn't been totally in vain ....

post Modern age ushered in by baby's whimper, not Bomb's bang

Two 'Booms' occurred in 1945 : which was more important ?

It was the year 1945, all historians seem to agree , that ushered out the Modern age and ushered in the post Modern age : and ushered it in with some sort of a bang.

But what sort of bang : was it the secretive Manhattan Project's Atom Bomb big Boom !!! ?

Or was it the smallest Manhattan Project's inclusive vision of penicillin priced and available for all , a vision that encouraged women all over the world to see a brighter future ahead and gave them reason to want to get pregnant ?

Was it then the penicillin-and-good-health fueled Baby Boom that really ushered in our current age ?

Was an old age ushered out by a newborn baby's contented whimper ?

That's sort of my take : yes, revulsion against yesterday's exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz.

But also gratitude for today's inclusionary values that gave us  'cheap and abundant penicillin for all' , with its promise of a healthy childhood ahead for most newborn children.....

The smallest Manhattan project had the BIGGEST impact : the irony of 75 years on ...

With the hindsight of 75 years on, for the Modern Age 1945 turned out to be "the best of times and the worst of times" , its apogee and  its nadir.

The triumph of the biggest Manhattan Project : America's exclusive patent on the ability to synthesize and destroy the atomic building blocks of reality, seemed to demonstrate how potentially profitable the total control of Nature could be.

By contrast, the smallest Manhattan Project seemed a throwback to an earlier age.

It went back to Nature and to the penicillium mold to provide a medical miracle and then compounded this affront to the modern ethos by inclusively and cheaply offering it to all :  to the poor, to the tired and to the huddled.

But if exclusivity and the synthetic were the hallmark of the Modern Age, our present age always seeks the greatest possible inclusivity and much prefers the natural over the artificial.

Perhaps then, in one of history's frequent ironies, 1945's smallest Manhattan Project turned out to have had the biggest impact after all......

The irony of 1945's twin triumphs ...

1945 was , on any account, an extraordinary year, not the least for its twin scientific triumphs.

At the time, it was almost universally held that the Man-made Bomb was the way of an atomic future so bright we'd have to wear shades .

By contrast, 1945's new Microbe-made medicine (natural penicillin) was viewed as but a temporary anomaly, a dusty throw back to the outdated caldron practises of medieval midwives.

But more than a half century later we are no longer so sure of all of this.

Atomic energy has not at all fulfilled its early promise.

Meanwhile, microbiology and biotechnology (descendants of 1945's natural-produced penicillin) have far outshot their 1945 rival, synthetic chemistry.

So today, with 20/20 hindsight, while 1945 can still feel like the apogee of the Modern age,it is also revealed as its very nadir.

Because 1945 is now seen as the birthday of our present post-Modern age.

In which case, Henry Dawson's twin follies of advocating on behalf of small individuals and on behalf of small microbes can be seen as promoting a distinguishing hallmark of postmodernity.

For few of us, under the age of eighty, devote much energy these days to replacing our current rainbow of many small cultures with a return to yesterday's dreary unitary monoculture of constipated WASP-dom.....

Are the small just a tiny part of the Modern past or a vital part of the Postmodern future ?

Two hundred years from the event, historians will be telling classrooms that when it comes to exam time, they should remember that WWII boiled down to just one issue.

One - scientific - issue.

Were the small to be considered just a tiny part of Modernity's dusty past or were they to be a vital part of the (postmodern/multi-coloured) future ?

In early 1939 , on one side was virtually all of the world's educated.

On the other, was Henry Dawson : and that was his folly.

By late 1945 , Henry Dawson was dead and gone and so his current opinion was irrelevant.

But many of the world's younger educated had moved - under the course of many events - one begun by Henry himself - to doubt their parents' and grantparents' position on the matter.

For if the smartest pundits of the war's end were sure that 1945 represented the apogee of modern bigness , by about 1978 leading commentators are just as sure it actually represented Modernity's nadir and the birth of our present day Postmodernity.

But Dawson's all-out efforts to defend the small under the assault of WWII values caused his premature death, so he wasn't around in his mid-eighties to enjoy his vindication.

That to was his folly ; or his eternal glory ...

"Penicillin : Just in Time" , a movie just waiting to be made

Too bad so many books, movies and TV shows force us to remember how WWII ended with a bang over a city in Japan, with tens of thousands of young mothers and babies burning to death in the streets below.

Because WWII also ended with a whimper, in a city in the Netherlands, and this time with a young mother snatched from death , just in time, and her new baby happily and noisily whimpering at her breast.

Her salvation was stolen from Allied government stores and wafted gently down to her, strictly on the QT, via a RAF issued handkerchief used as a makeshift parachute, from a bomber riding shotgun above her nation.

Life-saving Natural Penicillin , the only truly Good News story of WWII,  just won't have happened during WWII,  if not for a few brave souls.

A few with the moral courage and the intellectual courage (and in one case, the  physical courage) to stand up to doubting colleagues and censuring government bureaucrats and who were willing to break laws and steal penicillin, to do what was right and to try and save lives while there was still time to do so.

A few brave souls can indeed change our whole world, for the better, forever....

1945 : as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science

Hitler may have successfully convinced his most rabid followers that the murder of every last Jew in Europe was a fitting consolation prize for his failure to deliver up western Russia as the new frontier for the Aryan super race in 1941.

But the rest of humanity regarding Auschwitz as a particularly (and peculiarly)  modern and scientific crime made it particularly hard for modern scientists in the rest of the world to present their continuing support of eugenics as the public face of postwar biology.

Still Auschwitz in the end proved a godsend to Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist claims that Free Will didn't really exist but was simply manipulated by the chemical workings of a simple molecule called DNA.

Thanks to DNA, the old science of eugenics, ( ie its old positive program, along with a reduced version of its old negative program (now to be limited to families agreeing, semi-voluntarily, to the abortions of genetically 'damaged' foetuses) could carry on as before, but as the new science of DNA genetics.

DNA thus joined Atom-busting and Penicillin as three of the biggest triumphs of Modern Science, the three big Plan As that had emerged during WWII, if not all  as actual products of that war.

But let us look at these claims more closely.

 Atom-busting and atomic re-arranging is a natural event, discovered, rather than invented, by Modern Scientists.

It is based upon the discovery in 1896 (the same year that Henry Dawson was born) of natural radioactivity.

This is an event that is totally random and totally anti-deterministic ; we still have no idea when and why an individual atom breaks into two or more pieces.

I would thus take natural radioactivity as anti-modern, post modern, science at its most characteristic because it refutes one of three cornerstones of  all Modern Science : strong determinism .

This holds not just that every thing has a cause as to by it happens, but also that humans can discern that cause and then manipulate it to our advantage.

Another cornerstone of modern science is reductionism.

In the weak version of genetic reductionism, the one that we virtually all hold, it was already known by everybody before 1944, that whatever a gene was, at the bottom it had to exist as some arrangement of atoms.

(By contrast, strong genetic reductionism (chemical eugenics), as held by Avery, holds that once we know how those atoms are arranged, we can predict whether or not a girl will agree to date a particular boy.)

Viewed in this light, we might do well to remember that DNA manipulation was not invented by humans, but rather was only discovered by them  ---- and discovered by medical doctors, not geneticists.

Those medical doctors, led , above all, by Henry Dawson, discovered that some bacteria (intellectually as far from the mind of the modern scientist as can be) easily manipulate DNA in ways directly contrary to the Central Dogma of Biology and Genetics that genetic inheritance in vertical forward only.

(This vertical inheritance is the view that all that we are or can ever be , came directly from our (past) parents and their parents, an inheritance that is always strictly limited to remaining within our own species.)

In fact, microbes ( bacteria, viruses,sub-viruses, together with the smallest plants and animals are happy to snip DNA from here and drop it there, willy nilly : horizontal inheritance, HGT, across species, genus and families.

This is the major source for most of the real interesting genetic variety, including why all the world's bacteria can become resistant to a new drug in just ten years.

HGT is another 'difficult-to-get-your-head-around-if-you-have-High-School-Science', postmodern scientific concept, but it was guised in 1945 as another Plan A from Modern Science.

Penicillin was not invented like the totally synthetic sulfa drugs that proceeded it but rather it is produced by incredibly tiny fungus factories smaller than the eye can see.

Henry Dawson - again - led the way in proposing and using natural penicillin today over obtaining synthetic penicillin - maybe - tomorrow.

 But the chuzpha-bound men of modern science, naturally, tried to "point-to-with-pride" to the large stainless steel human factories that (nominally) held the smaller fungus factories doing all the work, as the source of our penicillin : just another Plan A of Modern Science.

Cheek !

In fact Chemistry, the Queen of the Sciences until 1945, faded after the war as a direct result of the rise of postmodern science of microbiology ---- directly as a result of the failure of  wartime synthetic chemists to make penicillin and most other antibiotics.

So much of modern science's triumphs of 1945 can just as readily be shown to be the anti-modern triumphs of postmodern science....

Modernity dies in an Adorno Moment : 1939-1945

Between  April 30th 1939 (when the New York's World Fair opened) and the November 20th 1945 (when the Nuremberg Trials opened) a lot of water (together with a lot of blood and brains) flowed under one of Modern civilization's few remaining un-bombed bridges :  call it WWII.

If  to the bemused Theodor Adorno, New York's fair was Modernity's bizarre apogee , he also saw Nuremberg's trials as Modernity's appalling nadir.

But I doubt that even Adorno and his co-conspirator Max Horkheimer had really expected Modernity to soar , burn and crash just that quickly.

Yet it clearly happened. Few people doubt that our new Age of post-Modernity can not be precisely dated to very late in the year of 1945.

Just as very few people deny that the opening of New York's World Fair of 1939 captured the absolute peak of Modernist optimism and hubris.

Now WWI also resulted in dramatic change all around the world.

But I would argue that while the surface of Modernity in 1919 was readily and intensely cracked all over, the deep superstructure actually held stronger than ever.

People often see WWI's dramatic results as the results of long standing tensions, buried below the surface, suddenly precipitating in a crisis situation.

Perhaps : tensions buried under the surface, but not that deeply buried.

By contrast, the surface of immediately post WWII Modernity didn't crack at all but actually burnished all the brighter ("Better Science won the War"), but deep down inside , the moral core of Modernity had lost its appeal to the young.

Modernist elders simply didn't seen their own self-inflicted wounds and so did nothing to reduce its shock upon their young.

As a result, the assault on their children's and grandchildren's moral certitudes was all the more stunning due to their elders' failure to genuinely reflect upon the meaning of the events of 1945.

But demographically, the rot had truly set in and it was now only a matter of time ------ and of baby booms ----  and of funerals....

The promise of Penicillin : the only good news to ever come out of The Bad News War

Six long years later and in a very different world from what they had so confidently predicted they'd be in, back in 1939, the Allied world celebrated that they had won.

(Those of the world - the majority - who had remained neutral during some or all of the moral battle against Hitler's evil chimed in that they had helped, too, by killing this latter day Kaiser with their mouths.)

More accurately, the Allies had survived : calling it 'winning' was going more than a bit too far.

The Soviet Empire was in ruins, with its population base and physical superstructure permanently damaged.

Its 1939 belief that the capitalist nations would fight it out during WWII, while the Soviets stayed neutral awaiting the inevitable triumph of a wonderful world of Communism was revealed to be hopelessly wrong.

Its buoyant pre-war self confidence in the rightness of the Soviet cause was pretty well gone by 1947.

Over the next 45 years, it slowly, slowly, slowly slip down into third world conditions by the time the empire formally imploded in 1992.

The British Empire of 1939 - holding 25% of the world - the biggest and richest ever seen - began formally collapsing much earlier, in fact the day Labour was elected in July 1945.

But for many Britons and their world-wide admirers, the bounce had gone out of the Anglo strut around the time of the Fall of Singapore.

America in 1939 had said it had no Empire and wished only to live apart and above the worldly fray.

It instead ended up as the world's policeman - at such a high cost in terms of money and moral certitudes - that is still dragging itself ever downwards today.

But let's rehearse all the good things that came out of of WWII , at least as 1945 saw it.

Victory ( see above) .

Jet planes - jet fighter planes with radar , atomic bombs, proximity fused shells  and napalm.

Rockets - with atomic bombs.

Nuclear powered submarines - armed with atomic missiles.

Cheap ,clean power from atomic power plants. Energy too cheap to meter, with radiation levels too low to monitor.

Plastics, lots of plastics and other synthetic chemicals.

Chemical insecticides - based on nerve gas and the gases used at Auschwitz.

The United Nations for peace - with an absolute veto over any possible action for peace  handed over to the only nations powerful enough to cause a serious war.

And penicillin.

Penicillin and other life-saving antibiotics.

That's my case .

Please add your choices for the best news out of WWII in the comment section below.....

Evolution of tanks - like the Evolution of Life - is all about compromises and niches

Reality is so varied and changing (in ways we humans will never ever be able to totally control or predict) that Evolution continuously throws up many successful ("fittest") evolving life forms to fill its many and evolving niches.

I was reminded, again,  of this while reading of the terrifying battles around the Vistula River in the winter of 1945 between German Tiger II tanks and Soviet T-34 tanks.

The long gun and excellent optical sight of the Tiger II was so good it could accurately destroy the enemy's main battle tanks from distances of up to 2.5 miles ; something today's best tanks would be hard pressed to match.

High speed shells from a long gun barrel leave in a fast straight line,  thus being both accurate and able to punch through thick armour, but normally both these qualities fall off quickly at increasing distances.

Close up, shorter guns firing slower shells can punch through medium thick armour with sort of acceptably accuracy.

To combat this, the Tiger II had very thick armour all around, particularly in the front, making them hard to destroy at even short distances, but also making them very slow and heavy on the ground.

But on cold hard ground they moved quickly enough and turned about quickly enough and so were able to destroy T-34s at a safe distance and get to any new locations where they were needed to stop break throughs dead.

Then the weather got warmer - now man and tank on both sides had a new misery.

They were warmer ,yes, but now their boots or tank tracks got stuck in the mud.

It proved fatal for the Tiger IIs. Fittest in the older - cold weather - niche - they proved to be unfit for the mud niche.

With the Tiger IIs stuck fast in mud due to their heavy weight, the lighter T-34s nimbly moved in behind then and destroyed them at close range through the Tiger II's thinner rear armour.

In a niche of mud, they were - temporarily - the fittest.

Despite the reality of no one size fits all, modernist armies still dreamed of producing all-arounder tanks, the "fit" for all situations instead of the "fittest for particular situations".

It is relatively easy to produce tanks with big long guns, immense armour, high speed, "low to the ground-ness" and great traction off road.

But as a result they consume lots of fuel and so have short range and a high rate of mechanical breakdowns in rough terrain : heavy and fast means pushing the finite metal strength limits of transmissions, tracks and engines.

Their weight and size makes it hard to haul them back to the rear for safe repair over wartime's normally terrible road conditions and impossible for them to cross small bridges , or be put on planes, many trains or most transporter trucks.

And they really don't like mud : their tracks are made as wide as possible to defeat mud issues given their great weight of armour and gun -- but too wide in the tracks department and their speed and fuel usage suffers.

They are ponderously might yes, but nimbly mite they are not.

And like all machines, they just sit there when out of gas - human soldiers can keep on fighting without food, their bodies wasting down to supply the missing energy.

But tanks without fuel can't waste down their armour to provide fuel and just sit there useless.

Before the Vistula battle actually began, some of the German tanks were moved into position, without using any petroleum fuel, to be used "hull down" as pillboxes, hauled there under a layer of hay by teams of Polish horses.

The mite Polish horses ambled their way to the front lines, eating their fuel along the roadside as they went : slowly and neatly confounding the German mighty....

"Triumph of the SCIENTIFIC Will" : WWII scientists as 'swimmers into technical sweetness leaping'..

Sure, sure: Hitler, Mussolini ,Tojo and Stalin and all that lot started the war, but it took the collective will of the world's best scientists and engineers to build their visions up into History's bloodiest, most heart-less war.

It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.

It was Science's incautious pre-war claims that moved the politicians and the generals and the industrialists and - above all - the ordinary public of all nations to fund the killing machines --- in preference to returning  to the foot soldier led wars of earlier times.

Of course in the end, we never saw the scientists in the box in Nuremberg in 1945 : because many many more of us, back then, saw 1945 as the apogee of Modernist science rather than its death knell and the birth of post-modernity.....

Penicillin : from Modern to ante-Modern in six bloody years

The biggest battle of WWII was NOT Stalingrad ( physically huge but intellectually a mere bun fight between History's worst dictators) but rather the battle over wartime penicillin : who makes it and who receives it.

For WWII definitely had a 'war within a war' aspect to it .


The billions of individuals who made up the modern global civilization of 1939 had six long - bloody  - years to re-evaluate whether the core values of their culture were really worth dying for, or were they only good for starting aggressive wars  - but not the sort of values for ending aggressive wars and securing permanent peace.

The New York World's Fair of 1939 promised a total world of man-made-ness but in the case of penicillin, man-made-ness ended in abject failure and it was Mother Nature that brought us this wonder drug when Man proved to be 'not up for the job'.

The world of 1939 eugenically exalted the Big and the Mighty and denigrated the weak and the small : penicillin (once it was a perfectly pure crystal shining brighter than a thousand suns) would be distributed on strictly Darwinian lines.

It would not be made in such quantities that would require the Allies to make one less bomber or battleship : so it would have to be rationed and so would go only to the eugenically 1A people .

(Be they fighting in foreign combat lines or winning the war behind some important desk in London or Washington.)

But by 1945, those same bombers were being pulled off their jobs of riding shotgun over the NRA nation and converted into butterflies to deliver life-saving grams of Nature-made penicillin to the dying all over the world : regardless of age, color, gender and economic status.

1945 was indeed the year that baby "Baby Boomers" started entering a very new , ante-Modern world......

1943 : Schindler's list versus America's non-list

wartime HOLOCAUST reports ignored by public

1993 : Fifty years after adult America first learned about the killing of millions of  European Jews - and did nothing about it - a new adult America was ready to turn a film about efforts to save some of those Jews into a massive movie hit.

Why not ?

 After all the vast bulk of those millions of film goers were under the age of 55* in 1993. In 1943, they were either tiny children or not even alive when their parents and grandparents first knew about the mass killing ---- but did nothing.

Their conscience, unlike those of their parents and grandparents, was perfectly clear and they felt free to watch the movie without severe attacks of regret and guilt.

If you were ten or older in June 1942, Schindler's List probably made you at least a bit uneasy....

But few Americans ( or Canadians or Britons, etc ) over the age of 55 in 1993 were so lucky.

They were old enough to remember the promises of Modernity before the events of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Katyn Forest brought all those certitudes into question.

Modernity suffered a mortal body blow during WWII , in 1945 in particular.

But with most people over the age of 15 in 1945 in some way implicated in supporting the values of Modernity that had led to these events, only time and the deaths it produced, were likely to see Modernity seriously challenged .

The youngest people of Modernity were just starting to leave the workforce in 1993 and so Modernity's people were finally losing their hold on the reins of power.

Reduced it but did not eliminate it : as owners, authors, columnists, scholars, voters, they still did have a considerable but ever diminishing ability to impede a new hegemony, if no longer able to direct the old hegemony.

Today in late 2012, almost 20 years after the release of the movie, anyone under 75 is likely to watch Schindler's List without the twinge of personal conscience.

Pre-war Modernity still has its billions of fans - but they are not  there at the time, so they can only admire from second hand and I believe its hold on their emotions is thus correspondingly far less strong......

* I think anyone born in 1937 or 1938 or late , ie under the age of about 7 or 8 in the Fall of 1945  is unlikely to have read the wartime daily papers or follow the nightly wartime radio news, with their steady if very low key presentation of reports detailing reported mass killings of Jews and others.

By way of pointed contrast, young Philip Roth born in early 1933 and later a famous novelist, does remember those reports very well.