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Moisseinen, Hanneriina – 1944

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19441

1944

I’ll confess, I didn’t think there were any angles to WWII yet to be uncovered, but I was wrong about that. The time frame of this one should be obvious from the title, and this is set in Karelia, an area of Northern Europe. Bombings were a regular occurrence back then (something most Americans can probably barely even comprehend), but meanwhile the citizens were trying to lead some semblance of a normal life. Or, at the very least, they were forced to deal with normal life going on around them, like what’s depicted in this comic. An alarm is sounded, the inhabitants of an area (including a barn that had obviously been hit before) were given two minutes to leave… and this was impossible because there was a cow giving birth. The people were confronted with a few options at that point, none of them good, but they went with the most human option and helped the cow. Still, the idea of traveling on the run with a baby calf wasn’t a good one, so they were once again confronted with a few options, and that’s where I’ll leave the story for the rest of you. There’s tragedy in the smallest things, and the image of the cow that I initially thought was amusing on the back cover turned out to be anything but. It’s a great but heart-wrenching story, all told in scratchy black and white that emphasized the feel of the whole area being under a constant cloud of greasy smoke. $4

19442