Do you know anything about Pearl Harbour? (December 7, 1941)

I don’t know much. I was ten years old in 1941, and I was a girl. My brother, four years older, was counting the years until he could enlist.. I’ve read a lot about it now that it’s history, but my memory of the announcement is totally young snd insignificant. We were just home from church and preparing to sit down for lunch when my father, home on furlough before he went overseas, turned on the radio to get the noonday news. What struck me later was how the time of day affected our memory. The attack occurred early that morning in Hawai’i. i We learned of it at noon in Winnipeg where we lived then.

Books have been written taking the notion as a point of entry—”Where were you when?”—and the event could be of the writer’s choosing. In the case of the first book I noticed the choice was Pearl Harbour. Later, a movie, Stalag 17 (see footnote) used the time factor to reveal an enemy in the midst of prisoners of war.

I think the idea has become a game we all play, a this-time-last-year examination to discover how far we’ve come, or not.

I guess Covid 19 has become a marker like that, a heavy, indelible sign of a time not yet past and still searing.

Where are you?

Stalag 17, American war film, released in 1953, that was directed by Billy Wilder and featured an Academy Award-winning performance by William Holden. The film is set in a German prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag 17, during World War II. It tracks the daily boredom and nighttime escape attempts of the resident U.S. airmen.