Barbara Kent Lawrence, Ed.D., is the author of the historical novel “Both Sides of the Pond, My Family’s War: 1933-1946,” her ninth book. She lives in Brunswick.

In his Oct. 25, 2025, article in the Times Record, “Realizing (at last) that history matters,” David Treadwell shows us that stories grounded in history are important and suggests that, too often, learning our stories has been reduced to memorizing dates.

Not only are these stories interesting, they are also important; if we don’t know the past, we are, as George Santayana warned, “condemned to repeat it.” If we don’t know where we come from and where we’ve been, how can we know where we want to go?

Researching and writing “Both Sides of the Pond, My Family’s War: 1933–1946” was a journey not only through family history but also through the history of countries in a time of great peril.

My parents died when I was 30 and my uncle only a few years later. I knew little then about their lives before I was born; they didn’t want to talk about the war and I was too self-absorbed to ask.

Years later, in 2007, however, I found a photograph of my British mother, Barbara, and my uncle, Kent, in their wartime uniforms — she as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, he as a lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Forces heading for France.

My mother had been a film star, and my uncle an accountant in a large firm. Looking at their handsome and innocent faces made me think how drastically their lives were about to change.

I knew that Kent would be rescued from Dunkirk to serve in several theaters of the war, and that my mother would survive 78 bombing raids before emigrating to the United States; they did not.

I learned their stories by interviewing members of my own family, people my uncle had served with and with whom my mother evacuated from the U.K., speaking with experts, reading war diaries and letters, as well as many books and articles, and exploring through sources like ancestry.com, ww2talk.com and others.

Slowly, I developed a deep appreciation for what my mother, uncle and father and so many others did to save their countries from dictatorship and preserve democracy.

As we celebrate Veterans Day, I hope we will celebrate the people in our families who served in World War II and subsequent conflicts, both abroad and at home. One way to do that is to listen to them or to research their stories if they are no longer here to tell them.

Given the state of our world, I must add that I found similarities between our own time and the prelude to World War II that concern me.

Autocracy is like a vine growing steadily, if sometimes imperceptibly, until it strangles its host. Appeasing Hitler, as Neville Chamberlain did, may have been necessary as Great Britain was not prepared to confront him, but giving in to a bully is not a long-term solution.

Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Joseph Wright point out in their New York Times article “A New Era of Strongmen is Upon Us” that increased conflict and violence “are the early shocks of a world being shaped by leaders who govern by personal will instead of rules and consensus.”

That impulse is something to fear and is driving leaders of several nations, including our own, to disregard other branches of government, constitutions and the will of peoples to be free from autocracy. Let’s honor those who fought to save democracy by guarding it ourselves.

One of the first and most important steps is to know our own history and learn from it.