I remember the night I finally asked about the world war, it wasn’t planned.
The power had gone out, and the house sat in a quiet that felt too heavy for ordinary conversation. Outside, the wind dragged dust across the ground, and for some reason, it reminded me of the image my father always stared at the city swallowed by smoke, buildings reduced to skeletons, the air thick and unforgiving.
“Grandpa,” I said, my voice smaller than I expected, “what really happened during the war?”
He didn’t answer immediately, my grandmother shifted beside him, her fingers tightening around the edge of her wrapper. Then he sighed, the kind of sigh that carries years inside it.
“You don’t ask about war unless you’re ready to hear the truth,” he said.
I nodded anyway, I really wanna know somethings about the world war
“It all started in the night,” he began, “night that started like any other. People were sleeping, some were laughing, some were planning tomorrow but then the sky changed.”
He described the sound first, not explosions, but something deeper seeming like a tearing. Like the world itself had been ripped open. People woke up confused, thinking it was thunder. But thunder doesn’t burn your neighbor’s house to the ground.
Fire spread faster than fear, he said and fear spreads fast.
My grandmother took over then, we ran, she said simply, with no shoes no direction, just running with our lives, looking for a place to hide
She told me how people pushed past each other, not out of cruelty, but out of desperation. Mothers carrying children, and children screaming for parents they lost in the chaos. Some fell and never got up not because they were weak, but because war doesn’t wait for you to rise.
Grandpa’s voice dropped, we thought that was the end. Many of us believed we would die that night.
I swallowed hard and asked, did the government help?
He gave a bitter smile, some tried, some were too late and some didn’t understand what was happening until everything was gone
They spoke of how an entire streets got erased before dawn, how homes turned to ash, how people who vanished without names being recorded. Casualties weren’t just numbers, they were neighbors, friends, family even our own enemies
“How many survived?” I asked.
Grandma shook her head slowly, I can't remember that, cause we'll barely made it
After the war, they said, survival became its own battle, lack of food to eat, no homes to lay out head, just no certainty. Just people walking through ruins, searching for loved ones, for meaning, for anything that felt like life before.
I understood something they had been carrying all along, that the world war didn’t end when the last fire died, It stayed in their voices, in their pauses, in the way they looked at the world.
That night, I didn’t just hear a story, I learnt and understood things
