In eight months of air raids over Britain from September 1940 to spring 1941, German bombers killed 40,000 British civilians, seriously injured 50,000 others, demolished hundreds of thousands of houses and damaged millions more. Leonard Woolf, in his extraordinary memoirs, describes the haunting silence the morning after an especially heavy German bombing that seemed to have left half of London in ruins; vast piles of rubble in the streets blocking traffic everywhere; almost no one moving about; losing his way again and again as he tried to walk across town to his office, unable to find a single familiar landmark other than the dome of St. Paul’s now and then appearing in view.

It is hard in this age of endless memorialization to even express this view without sounding callous: but Londoners did not turn their entire city into a “hallowed ground” or a shrine for the dead or a monument to British victimhood. They rebuilt, they went on, they rightly saw that the truest memorial to the dead was to show the Nazis that their city would rise again as if the Nazis had never existed on the face of the earth.

—Stephen Budiansky’s Liberal Curmudgeon Blog: Victimization and vengeance