Victory Days

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Not long ago “Readers’ Album” received two remarkably similar submissions. from Pennsylvania Dorothy Hrtyanski wrote about this grassy suburban scene: “It was May 1945 and V-E Day. My older brother Jack, my cousin Donna, and I [at right] knew we had to celebrate this special day, so we decided to parade around the neighborhood. Mother took our picture before we started out and told us that someday we would look back and remember what a special time it was for our country. ”

Meanwhile, Ann Pellicano, a former New Yorker now living in Rhode Island, came up with this view “taken in the early evening on a street in the Bronx on V-J Day in August 1945, shortly after we heard the news of Japan’s surrender. Even the children knew this was imminent, and we spent all day tearing up newspapers to make confetti. It took only a few minutes for it to be strewn everywhere. I am the kid with the big ears and dirty knees on the left. My two sisters are at my left; the other children are neighborhood friends.”

In city or country, when the bells rang out in May and August of 1945, everyone, down to the smallest child, knew why they tolled.