In unhistoric acts lies true history

25 March 2006

Frances Osborne says that the death of a dictator and a terrorist atrocity do not speak as powerfully to the human heart as a single image

Why do some people choose to leave (my new friend from Zimbabwe; the falling man) and others (those Balkan mothers and Lilla) hang on in the face of impending disaster? When people choose whether to change the family’s religion, or to move town or country, unless they are deranged they will do the best they believe they can for the people they love. Their decisions therefore show us what, in practice, the possibilities really were. How bad was religious persecution at that time? How meagre were job prospects or those of survival in those towers? Could they really afford to buy the boat or carriage fares out? How much information did they really have about their chances elsewhere? The answers to these questions are immensely revealing of both historical and contemporary situations.

Trying to understand these individual stories also forces us to remember that the people who make them don’t know what is going to happen next. Those Balkan mothers didn’t really believe that soldiers were going to storm their cosy village and burn their homes to the ground; they lived in Europe in the late 20th (not 12th) century. It seemed as likely as War of the Worlds meets Miss Marple. Similarly, Lilla and her family couldn’t conceive that the Japanese, with whom they had been on friendly terms for about 40 years, were going to lock them up in a camp and slowly starve them. In both cases, the prospect of leaving everything they had and starting again in an unknown place did not appear to be the best they could do for their family — in contrast to the choices made by the falling man and the refugees now coming in from Zimbabwe. All these choices provide valuable contemporary snapshots — without the obscuring wisdom of hindsight.

Zooming in on the lives of real people caught up on historical tides is not just shifting focus from the perpetrators to the victims. It’s about fleshing out the past from the bare bones of dates and statistics into a form to which most people can relate their own lives. Our own humanity connects us more directly with other humans and their struggles than do numbers. The bigger the numbers involved, the more we need those personal stories — feelings with which to empathise rather than figures to memorise. We can’t picture a thousand dead bodies without standing back so far as to make the features of each indistinct. We can more easily learn about the life of one person, look at their photographs, hear what happened to them — and then imagine it happening again and again and again. History isn’t just made in parliaments, but in homes, too.

Lilla’s Feast by Frances Osborne is published in paperback by Black Swan at £7.99.