Remembrance Day looms large in my family. Two generations of my mum’s family were conscripted: my great-grandfather in the first world war; my grandfather, still a teenager at the time, in the second.
He survived the fighting but never entirely recovered. Mum still cries when she thinks about what he experienced. His regiment was sent to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he helped bury hundreds upon hundreds of the Nazis’ victims. “He never spoke about it,” she told me, “but he would wake up screaming.”
