Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 112 - Victory
Welcome to Issue 112 of Deep Life Reflections, where each week I share my thoughts on what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.
This week, the idea of victory takes centre stage—what we fight for, what’s left behind, and whether the word still means what we think it does. We begin with Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, a masterful account of one of the most consequential—and most savage—battles of the twentieth century. Then we turn to the present day, with No Other Land, the Academy Award-winning documentary by a Palestinian-Israeli collective exposing the erasure of life in the West Bank.
As the world marks the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, we contemplate: what have we done with the peace we inherited?
Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
Stalingrad. By Antony Beevor.
“Stalingrad is no longer a town… Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.” — German tank officer, October 1942.
I keep a list of cities I’d like to visit in my lifetime. One of them is Volgograd, about 1,000 kilometres southwest of Moscow. Founded in 1589, it sits on the western bank of the Volga River. The city has a former name—Stalingrad. A gargantuan statue towers over the city—The Motherland Calls—commemorating what happened there between the winter of 1942 and 1943, when Hitler fixed his sights on seizing the eastern front, succeeding where Napoleon had failed 127 years earlier.
What followed would become one of the most consequential—and most vicious—battles in human history.
I first read Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad in the summer of 2018. It’s a book I’ve often thought about. As the world marks the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day, the battle remains a defining historical marker: Hitler’s first territorial defeat in Europe. What he envisioned as a swift, decisive victory on the eastern front instead collapsed into a long, grinding war of attrition. It left Germany fighting a war on two fronts. The die was cast.
Beevor, a British military historian and former soldier, has crafted a meticulously researched account of the battle, including the build-up and aftermath. He’s also a fine storyteller, documenting the micro-stories of human suffering and hardship, whether soldier or civilian, German or Soviet.
He was granted rare access to Soviet archives in Volgograd—which were surprisingly unvarnished by Stalinist propaganda. Stalin, it turns out, was so concerned with the outcome of the battle that he wanted the absolute truth. Stalingrad bears that hard truth on every page.
In late August 1942, the German 6th Army, commanded by General Friedrich Paulus, launched its assault on Stalingrad with approximately 330,000 soldiers. The Soviets were ready and knew what was at stake. If Stalingrad fell, the south of the country would be cut off from the centre. They’d also lose control of the Volga, the strategic artery vital for transporting essential war supplies.
Stalin forbade civilians from leaving the city. They were put to work building defensive fortifications. He also rushed all available troops to Stalingrad. It made little difference in the early days. The Germans overran Soviet positions. Stalin threw more men at the city. Cannon fodder. Tens of thousands. Many barely trained. The city looked doomed, but somehow, they held on.
The fighting was brutal: hand-to-hand combat in each room of every building. Grenade, bayonet, knife, fist. It was massively destructive to both armies. The city was ablaze, bodies littered in rubble, death permanent.
For the Soviets, General Georgy Zhukov oversaw Stalingrad’s defence. He would eventually launch an unexpected, brilliant, and deadly counteroffensive, effectively encircling the entire German Sixth Army, cutting them off from retreat.
And food.
In appalling weather—the unforgiving Russian winter, bitter, bleak, and sub-zero—German soldiers boiled leather for soup. Then they ate the dead horses. Then they ate the dead.
General Paulus, responsible for the lives of his men, asked Hitler many times for permission to surrender. Hitler refused every request. Surrender was not an option for any German, let alone an entire army. On the day before the surrender, Hitler promoted Paulus to Field Marshal, implicitly urging him to commit suicide rather than be captured, since no Field Marshal had ever been taken alive.
Paulus defied him, stating:
“I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal.”
[Hitler’s own wartime rank—corporal in the First World War—was a point of contempt among many of Germany’s senior officers.]
On January 31, 1943, Paulus surrendered to Soviet forces. By then, only about 91,000 soldiers were still alive, many in horrific condition. Starved and frozen. Most didn’t survive the march to prisoner camps. Fewer than 6,000 would survive captivity and return home.
The Battle of Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for Hitler. Germany would never hold the upper hand again.
Soviet losses in the war are estimated at 22 million—some estimates place the figure closer to 27 million. Over half were civilians.
The great Russian writer Vasily Grossman was present for many key moments of the siege, including the German surrender. Beevor quotes him throughout Stalingrad, treating Grossman as source and moral conscience. In one of Grossman’s most poignant lines, he writes:
“War is always the same — a field of mud, blood, and death, where courage is inseparable from cruelty, and victory belongs not to the just, but to the enduring.”
People can endure almost anything if they believe the land is worth it.
The problem is: so can their enemies.
And leaders—on all sides—often ask too much of those beneath them.
2. What I’m Watching
No Other Land. Directed by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor.
No Other Land, winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary, is co-directed by a group of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers. It documents the ongoing destruction of Masafer Yatta, a cluster of villages in the southern West Bank of Palestine.
Families have lived in Masafer Yatta for generations. But the area has been designated a military training ground by the Israeli government, meaning the population’s presence is officially considered illegal. Rebuilding their demolished homes is also considered illegal since they need building permits—which, of course, they can’t get. It’s a vicious circle by design.
The filmmakers document the results. And we watch.
In one scene, as a bulldozer hovers behind her house, a woman screams, “My daughters are still in there!” A soldier replies, with little empathy or hesitation: “Doesn’t matter.”
One critic put it plainly:
“If ‘doesn’t matter’ is your response to a woman’s plea for her daughters’ lives, regardless of her politics/culture/religion/race, etc., then you have left the human circle entirely.”
No Other Land is not a film about politics. It’s a film about property. About land. About what is means to have your home bulldozed while the world looks away. Children crying as their school is torn down. Mothers and fathers white-hot with anger—and fear. Left feeling powerless and empty. They try to appeal to the soldiers’ humanity: “If this was your home, how would you feel?”
They are ignored.
A man named Ivan oversees the demolitions. He is indifferent. Contemptuous. It’s psychological warfare as much as physical.
One man is shot for refusing to surrender his generator, vital to the community. He survives, but is left paralysed from the neck down. He now lives in a cave, cared for by his perpetually distraught mother. Doctors can’t reach him. Journalists visit, take photos, offer sympathy, then leave.
One day, soldiers pour cement into the only well in the area.
Homes are demolished. And then—under cover of darkness—this resilient community rebuilds them. Knowing full well they’ll be torn down again. And they will rebuild again. This takes courage and conviction. Until they can’t.
The film is seen through two sets of eyes: Basel, a young Palestinian activist, and Yuval, an Israeli journalist. They are two of the four co-directors. It’s their friendship and alliance that helps give the film its power and moral clarity. Two voices from opposing sides united by a simple conviction: this cannot continue. It must stop.
They—and we—are watching something we know, instinctively, is wrong: the bulldozing of civilian homes. We can debate borders, security, and history. But some actions fall outside the human circle.
On stage, accepting the Academy Award, co-director Yuval Abraham said that Palestinians and Israelis had made the film together “because together our voices are stronger.”
He went on:
“When I look at Basel I see my brother but we are unequal… There is a different path. A political solution. Without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people… Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people [Israelis] can be truly safe if Basel’s people [Palestinians] are truly free and safe… There is another way. It’s not too late for life, for the living.”
The film was shot between 2021 and 2023. Its focus is solely on the West Bank, governed by the Palestinian Authority, and the impact on Palestinians living there. It makes no mention of Gaza or Hamas, though it briefly references the events of October 7 in its final moments.
Yet even with an Academy Award and near-universal critical acclaim (8.3 on IMDb; 100% on Rotten Tomatoes) the film has proved difficult to distribute. It’s been picked up in only 24 countries and has no distribution in the United States at the time of writing. I eventually found it on Channel 4 in the U.K. Art should always be accessible. You can’t have a view if you can’t see.
Writing in The Guardian, Adrian Horton observed:
“No Other Land, for its many images of despair, still offers a stirring vision for what could be — Israelis and Palestinians working together in the name of justice, collaborating towards a world where both are free.”
That vision is indeed stirring, but it feels distant. Still, it’s something. Not turning away.
Not thinking it ‘doesn’t matter.’
3. What I’m Contemplating
As I wrote above, people can endure almost anything if they believe the land is worth it. This week’s two works show what happens when land becomes sacred—not for its soil, but for what it represents.
Eighty years after Victory in Europe, I thought: what have we done with that victory?
So I made a list. Far from comprehensive but a starting point. Progress is never a straight line. The end of one war simply marks the beginning of new choices, new tensions. Our imagination races forward. But so do our bad habits and blind spots.
‘Victory’ then is a contested word, a tug-of-war between progress and regression.
Since 1945, we have…
Split the atom again—and again.
Not yet repeated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Sent humans to the moon and robots to Mars.
Started The Cold War—and nearly ended everything in 1962.
Invented the internet. Then became addicted to it.
Created the UN. Failed to prevent dozens of wars.
Witnessed genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia…
Built cities that glow from space.
Failed to halt the melting ice caps.
Watched the Berlin Wall fall.
Rebuilt Germany and Japan into economic powers.
Invented social media. Then let it fracture our politics and lives.
Founded the EU. Watched Britain leave it.
Ended apartheid. Elected authoritarians.
Saw the rise of China.
Saw the rise of ISIS.
Began the War on Terror. Killed more civilians than terrorists.
Made progress in civil rights. Saw it rolled back.
Created nearly 100 new countries.
Learned the name of every hurricane.
Became healthier. Faced a global shutdown.
Made The Terminator. Then built our own Skynet.
Left the Holocaust behind. And now see antisemitism rise again.
This isn’t a scorecard. Just a back-of-the-envelope reckoning on where we’ve come since 1945, and where we might be going. In a world that keeps demanding order, even as it breaks it apart.
4. A Quote to note
“Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed—while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.”
- Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
5. A Question for you
What single act would you most like to be remembered for?
Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.
James
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