There is a wealth of human stories waiting for an audience beyond their original narrow confines.

From For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II by Mike Dash. Fascinating.

I posted on something similar a couple of years ago, A Commanding Sense of Duty.

From the Russian article:

The sight that greeted the geologists as they entered the cabin was like something from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—"a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar," with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim light, the visitors saw that it consisted of a single room. It was cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five.

One of the wonderful things about the reconnecting of the world as a part of globalization are the gradual unearthing of human stories from the far corners.

I was thinking of this the other day when I finished Eric M. Hammel's Six Days of June: How Israel Won the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It is a bit logistically detailed but an interesting read none-the-less. The Six Day War proceded in a rolling sequence, roughly two days conquering the Sinai, then two days conquering the West Bank and finally two days conquering the Golan Heights with a little bit of overlap between each theater. Absolutely incredible.

While Hammel's account is rich in military details, it is relatively light on the human stories. One of the striking elements was the series of flash encounters in the Sinai where Israeli and Egyptian forces would suddenly collide, sometimes unexpectedly. In the resulting battle, the Israeli would usually smash through with Egyptian soldiers retreating singly into the Sinai desert.

And my question was: what happened to those retreating soldiers. I am sure that most of the tens of thousands would have given themselves up to the Israelis within a few days. Some most likely would have been lured into the desert wilderness and died. But likely there were some that probably found ways of surviving for days and weeks. Some might have been able to retreat across the desert to rejoin other Egyptian units. And perhaps a very few might have made their way all the way back across the Suez Canal into Egypt.

We have those level of stories from out western wars; Battle of the Bulge, Guadalcanal,Philippines, etc. and even from some more remote battles such as Stalingrad and Leningrad.

But what about those Egyptian stories? Were they told and written about in Egypt but have never made it into the western press? In other words, they exist but just need to be circulated. Or maybe those stories were told but just not in a western fashion to appeal to a broader public. Or were those stories never told and/or never written down?

I don't know but I think there is the prospect, just as in this story out of Russia, that there is a wealth of human stories waiting for an audience beyond their original narrow confines.