SEEING IS BELIEVING

I'm reading Antony Beevor's excellent  Second World War at present.

His use of first hand memoirs interspesed amongst the historical facts is interesting and effective.
The scale of the suffering and losses of life in China and Eastern Europe is hard to grasp.
The bombing of cities in the UK, Germany, Poland, Russia, Japan and other countries while not resulting in as much loss of life is described well and has a lot of pathos. It is still hard to imagine the worry and fear that the inhabitants were subjected to.

When in Aberdeen over Christmas and New Year I saw an empty lot at the end of the street that The Old Girl's mother lives in. She told us that the house which had stood there was obliterated by a bomb during a raid on Aberdeen in 1943. They never rebuilt.
The gap next to a still standing building was visceral and in a way haunting meaning a lot more to me than thousands of words could describe.