Christopher Thornton teaches in the Department of American Literature and Culture Studies at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Poland. He also writes on numerous travel-related topics that reflect social, cultural, and historic issues in many parts of the world. His first book, Descendants of Cyrus: A Journey Through Everyday Iran, revealed the Iran that rarely appears in media images. A few years later he published Iran in Pictures: A Photographic Insight, a collection of 350 photos with 125 pages of text. He has two books planned for the near future: Democracy at 30: A Look at Europe’s East and Nations Within: A Tour of Native America. Before settling in Poland he lived in Holland, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, where he taught at the American University in Cairo.

Gaza: We Know How It Ends

By Christopher Thornton

We know how the Gaza war will end. We may never know the final number of Palestinians killed because any count may or may not include the pieces of bodies that will be eventually extracted from the rubble. They may be added to the “missing,” and how can parts of bodies be counted anyway? We won’t know the cost of the destruction until long after the Strip is rebuilt, at least a decade from now. Until then it will be immersed in varying estimates, and how to calculate the loss of cultural and historic sites, such as the church of St. Porphyrius, the third oldest in the world? And then, how will the reconstruction be funded? We also don’t know the date of the final bullet being fired or last missile strike. And what is the future of a postwar Gaza—a second occupation? Permanent settlement? Something else? For now, the answers to all of these questions have been cloaked in the obscure language of press briefings and diplomatic talking points or, by now, ignored entirely.

Despite current avoidance of the hard questions, we know how the Gaza war will end—its finality—and how it will be remembered. We only need to look at history, and not that far back, for the 20th century was uncomfortably chock-a-block with sieges and bombardments, as if medieval-style warfare had to be resurrected to remind us of the well-worn phrase, “the horror of war.”

After World War I a prime candidate for the first widespread and indiscriminate attack on civilians was arguably the bombardment of Guernica, a city in the Basque region of northeast Spain, during the Spanish Civil War. It was a Monday, market day, in April 1937 when the city center was filled with an estimated 10,000 residents and farmers from the countryside. As it was ending, German planes appeared on the horizon and began carpet bombing the city. The rationale was that Guernica was being used as a communication center by the socialist-backed Republicans, but the position of Guernica was strategic in other ways. It blocked the Nationalists from the Basque capital of Bilbao and had become an exit point for retreating Republicans. In three hours it was over.

The amount of ordnance dropped on the city is still unknown, but the heaviest bombs weighed half a ton, able to crash through the strongest architectural structures and explode with devastating force. The number of dead is also unknown and estimates vary widely. The most conservative is 200 or so. Russian estimates claim 800, while the highest stands at 1,700. Oday the bombing stands out as one of the first uses of “modern” air power and the number that could be killed in such a short time.

Today Guernica (Gernika in the Basque language) is a quiet, pleasant town in the heart of the Basque region, which would have remained largely unknown and undistinguished were it not for the devastation that was released on that spring afternoon. It was memorialized in Pablo Picasso’s wall-sized mural that carries the name of the town. Aside from its worldwide renown, the event of April 1937 is not forgotten locally. Today, in the center of the city a museum reminds visitors of the details, background, and impact of the event. There are the expected news reports and witness accounts, but also the recreation of an apartment where the experience of the bombing is recreated through sound and visual effects.

Amidst the massive destruction and loss of life of World War II, two events stand out for their calculated barbarity and extent of suffering. The first was the siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg as it is now known) by the German army from September 1941 to January 1944. For 872 days a massive force surrounded the city, blocking the entry of food and medical supplies, and cutting the provision of water and electricity. Cultural and historical sights, most notably the Romanov palaces on the outskirts of the city, were bombarded, but from the beginning the Germans’ most effective and insidious weapon was the blockade of food. Virtually every patch of green in the city was transformed into a fruit and vegetable garden, yet starvation ravaged the population. Hospitals were shelled, killing medical workers and patients recovering from their injuries. Dead bodies often lay on the streets, unburied. At the time it was the longest siege ever endured by a civilian population in the history of warfare. A “mere” 5,700 residents died from the bombardments, but 1.5 million succumbed to starvation.

The siege of Leningrad stands as painful and emblematic symbol of the sacrifice paid by the Russian people in the Great Patriotic War (as World War II is known in Russia). In the Soviet era a Monument to the Human Defenders of Leningrad was placed in Victory Square, and in the middle of the siege the composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Leningrad Symphony as a reminder to the world of what was taking place in the city of his birth.

The second event is the bombing of Rotterdam by the German Luftwaffe in May 1940. The rationale was to eviscerate the Dutch resistance and force its surrender. Also, as a thriving port, the city was the Netherlands lifeline to outside assistance, military and otherwise,

Within two to three days over a thousand 400-kilogram bombs were dropped on the city. As they struck many houses immediately burst into flames. There was little to no resistance because the Netherlands had only the shadow of an air force and all anti-aircraft guns has been repositioned to the capital, the Hague. The historic center was completely destroyed, and almost all of the inner city. Only the 15th-century St. Lawrence Church survived

Rotterdam has long since regained its place as the busiest port in the world. What was its city-center and a showpiece of Dutch “Golden Age” architecture is now a mishmash of styles that were seen as “modern” in the decades after World War II, perhaps to deliberately erase the memory of the bombing. Yet in 1953 a sculpture named The Destroyed City was unveiled in the city center. It shows a twisted human figure writhing as its hands reach toward an imaginary rescue, or hope, or empty sky above. Its creator, Ossiy Zadkine, described it as “a cry of horror against the human brutality and this act of tyranny.” The raised arms have found a parallel in Picasso’s Guernica.

By the end of the war the Allied forces of Great Britain and the United Staes would respond in kind. This time the target was Dresden, a major industrial city in southeastern Germany. In early 1945 the war was clearly lost for Germany, as the Soviet Red Army was advancing on Berlin. Nevertheless, within three days the U.S. Air Force and Britain’s RAF unloaded 4,000 tons of bombs on the city. Many were incendiary bombs, designed not only to explode but burst into flames, igniting everything in their surroundings. Twenty-five thousand people were killed, almost all civilians. The reasoning was that Dresden had been serving as a communication and transport hub for the German army, and bombing it would bring the war to a quicker end. Many historians claim that pure revenge for numerous Nazi atrocities also played a role. Yet once again, it was the civilians who paid the highest cost. One of the survivors wrote:

We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.

And another:

To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. Suddenly, the sirens stopped. Then flares filled the night sky with blinding light, dripping burning phosphorus onto the streets and buildings. It was then that we realized we were trapped in a locked cage that stood every chance of becoming a mass grave.

In Dresden’s Heidefriedhof Cemetery a memorial reads:

How many died? Who knows the count? In your wounds one sees the agony of the nameless, who in here were conflagrated, in the hellfire made by hands of man.

A look at our recent past might make us believe that humanity had taken a break from the commitment of atrocities, that the many war crimes of World War II and resulting trials had frightened us, even compelling us to behave ourselves for once. But it was not to last. The end of the cold war and the collapse of communism, mostly peaceful, was burdened with an exception—the breakup of Josef Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia—which saw a return to humanity’s old ways.

Another siege, medieval-style but with 20th-century weapons, was imposed on the Croatian city of Dubrovnik by Serb forces that shelled the city from the surrounding hills and from offshore battleships for nine months. The Old Town, first known as Ragusa as part of the Kingdom of Italy in the seventh century, was then swapped many times for a millennium between the Republic of Venice and several others before it was folded into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes after World War I. This would later, after World War II and a series of global power plays, result in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, led by war hero Josef Broz Tito, socialist rather than communist and kept an arm’s distance from Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The breakup of this stable, multireligious, and multiethnic union, beginning in 1991 with the end of communism, led to the internal republics battling for territorial control. In Croatia it was concentrated on the Old Town of Dubrovnik, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

For almost eight months the Serb army bombarded the city from the inland hills as the Montenegrins contributed the air power from the sea. Following historic patterns, water and food supplies were cut. The residents did what they could to shield the historic monuments from destruction, wrapping the medieval Onofrio Fountain and its “brother,” the Little Onofrio, in metal sheeting, and the modern-day armor preserved them.

Today the Old Town has been rejuvenated, with all of the most visible scars of the war erased by meticulous restoration teams. At the end of the Stradun, the central throughfare laid out in the medieval era, there is as a modest museum, or memorial site. In a small, unassuming room hang dozens of black-and-white headshots of local residents who lost their lives fighting for the city.

We will move forward, but only a year, to the next major siege in recent history, that of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo during the same war. Once again the Serb army surrounded the city from a rim of hills. For almost three years the Serb forces pounded it with artillery while snipers took up positions to pick off residents as they scrambled for food and other essentials. Signs reading, “Beware, Snipers!” were a frequent sight. Meša Selimović Boulevard, the main thoroughfare connecting the city center to the airport, soon became nicknamed “Sniper’s Alley.” Residents filled plastic buckets and containers with water drawn from the Sarajevo River, which tumbles down from the mountains and cuts through the center of the city. When electricity was available the source was usually still-charged car batteries. ;

From the beginning, water, food, and electricity were cut. Plastic sheeting substituted for glass windows, almost all of which were soon blown out. Through it all, classes for schoolchildren were held, when they could, in the stairwells of still-standing school buildings to keep them safe from unexpected and unpredictable bombardments. Sarajevo’s only link to the world was a tunnel dug from a house on the outskirts of the city under an airport runway and on to the airport itself, where a U.N. force still held control.

The siege began in April 1992 and ended in February 1996, making it three times longer than the Siege of Leningrad and the longest of any capital city in the history of modern warfare. Half a million bombs were dropped, averaging over 400 a day. Fourteen thousand Bosnians were killed, many from snipers’ bullets. Hardly a building escaped damage. Thirty-five thousand were totally destroyed. Adhering to well established patterns, medical services and hospitals were attacked, along with ambulances and U.N. facilities. As in most bombardments, there are single, signature events that seem to earn it a place in our collective memory. In Sarajevo it was a strike on the Markale Market in the center of the city. Sixty-eight people were killed and another 144 were injured, many grievously. As in Guernica it was market day.

Today, Sarajevo is renewed but scarred. Many of the buildings that weren’t destroyed are still peppered with bullet holes. There are few trees standing more than 30 years old because most were cut down for firewood. But the most visible, lasting memory of the war is the numerous gravestones that stand in city parks, the lawns surrounding neighborhood mosques, and even the large hillside park fronting the city library. Throughout the siege the infield of the stadium built for the 1984 Winter Olympics became an impromptu burial ground, along with most of the city’s patches of green, because the cemeteries, mostly on its fringes, were out of reach or too dangerous to approach.

In 1993 the International Criminal Court in the Hague set up a special tribunal to address the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Bosnian War. In the end 62 Serb military personal and political leaders were convicted. This included Radovan Karadic, leader of the breakaway ultra-nationalist Republic of Serbska, Ratko Mladic, commander of the Serb forces. Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia, was also arrested but died of a heart attack before his trial could be concluded.

On the eastern end of the city is a museum that preserves the memory of the siege. One of the most poignant exhibits is the recreation of an apartment kitchen to reflect the living conditions that Sarajevan’s endured. Another museum documents the experiences of children, who are now the adults walking the streets of the city in a living testament of survival. At the junction of Kreševljakoviča and Mjedinica streets burns an eternal flame, surrounded with flowers that wilt in time and are replaced by those who keep the memory of the siege alive.

A look back at other sieges and bombardments within the last hundred years gives us blueprint of how the war in Gaza will be memorialized, and remembered The death toll alone has already far exceeded that of any of the previous bombardments, except for the siege of Leningrad. Aerial views of the Gaza Strip, with their broad panoramas of piles of concrete and gaunt, skeletal remains of apartment towers and office complexes, mirror images of Rotterdam, Dresden, and Warsaw at the end of World War II.

So we can already envision the end of this war, and the true end—how it will be remembered, not the day when the final missiles are fired. Memorials will honor the deaths of the hundreds of medical workers, journalists, and U.N. employees wherever hospitals and U.N. schools once stood. But unlike the small museum in Dubrovnik, no photos will provide them with a human face because the number would run the length of the Gaza Strip. Memorials will also appear where mass graves have been found, such as the pit near Al Shifa Hospital where 400 bodies were dumped, along with the site of the “Flour Massacre,” where 110 Palestinians were gunned down while gathering for a food delivery.

As in the other episodes, survivors’ tales will memorialize of their experiences, such as that of the mother who carried her dead son for two days out of northern Gaza so he could be given a proper burial rather than be ground up by the bulldozers that will take an estimated 10 years to clear out the rubble. And the war crimes indictments will number in the hundreds, but unlike the war in the former Yugoslavia, many of the trials will go quickly, owing to the two thousand videos posted on social media sites by soldiers celebrating their crimes, many of whom have been identified.

In spite of the widespread ambiguity over the next stages of the war, we know it will be remembered for decades and possibly centuries, but likely not the words of Albert Einstein, delivered shortly after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “The time has come now, when man must give up war. It is no longer rational to solve international problems by resorting to war.”