Warning: This post mentions violence, death, suicide and discusses disturbing topics — reader discretion is advised.
Learning about tragic moments in history can range from morbidly interesting to kind of therapeutic. It can be sad, but there’s also something very human in empathizing with the lost people of our past. So, when I saw this post on the popular Ask Reddit page from user moseich asking people, “What historical fact makes you cry?” I had to read through the answers — and I learned a lot that I hadn’t known before! I thought it’d be worth it to share; so, here are some of the most interesting answers:
1.“A story from my great-grandfather, who fought in WWI: Soldiers would cease fire to pick up their men’s bodies and have a smoke together, then go back to their trenches, and start firing again. Neither side of the frontline soldiers actually wanted to be there. They were just drafted for war.”
Daily Herald Archive / Getty Images
—u/SamTheArse
2.“Albert Göring, the staunchly anti-Nazi brother of Hermann Göring, spent World War II helping Jewish people and dissidents to escape. He was caught several times, but was let off the hook due to his brother’s influence within the Reich. After the war, he was shunned for his last name, and his accomplishments were forgotten.”
“He also knew that after his death, his pension would be transferred to his wife, so he married his housekeeper a week before he died as thanks for her work.”
3.“‘This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. I looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog.'”
Fine Art / Getty Images
“—Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his own death.”
4.“After the Pearl Harbor attack, at least some men were alive in a pocket of air inside one of the capsized ships. Navy personnel could hear them banging on the hull and trying to signal for help, but there was no way to get at them safely. The water was full of fuel and oil, so blowtorches weren’t a workable idea. And there was no way for divers to get into the ship because the damage had rendered the whole thing a deathtrap of twisted steel. There wasn’t even any way to communicate with the trapped men.”
Keystone / Getty Images
“So the guards at Pearl Harbor had to listen to those calls for help getting weaker and weaker, while inside everyone slowly suffocated.
When they hauled the ship up for scrap later, there were 16 notches scratched onto the wall of that compartment, which means at least one casualty of Pearl Harbor lived until December 23, 1941.”
“Perhaps delirium set in and they thought it was a new day, but really they just went unconscious for a couple of hours.”
5.“The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The doors to the exit and the stairwells were locked. So you either had to jump out the window or be burned alive.”
Keystone / Getty Images
—u/mpafighter
“Sadly, it takes a tragedy to enact change. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire is why all buildings must have outward-opening doors that cannot be locked.”
—u/Butternades
6.“Sacagawea, who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their expedition to explore the lands we now know as the Western United States, had a vital coincidence on the journey that always makes me emotional to think about.
Graphicaartis / Getty Images
“She was born a Shoshone but was taken around the age of 12 and made a slave to the Hidatsa. After being with them for three or so years, she was sold to a Frenchman named Toussaint Charbonneau, who took her as a wife. When Lewis and Clark met her, she was about 16 years old and pregnant with Charbonneau’s child. The birth was a tough one, and Lewis helped with the child’s safe delivery before Sacagawea and Charbonneau joined them on the expedition.
Lewis and Clark knew they would meet the Shoshone on their journey and were hoping Sacagawea could help them procure some supplies, especially horses, to help them cross the Rocky Mountains.
Sacagawea didn’t speak English. She spoke Shoshone and Hidatsa. Charbonneau spoke Hidatsa and French, and one of the members of Lewis and Clark’s expedition spoke French and English. Suffice to say, translation was complicated and complex.”
“When the expedition finally came upon the Shoshone’s territory, they agreed to meet and hear Lewis and Clark’s proposal. They sat down around the fire and began negotiations. The chief of the tribe began to speak with Sacagawea, and the conversation proceeded rapidly. The others, unable to really understand what was going on, were confused when she and the chief began to cry, and then to embrace.”
Mpi / Getty Images
“In the years since her capture, it turned out, Sacagawea’s brother had become chief. He had believed her dead, and she did not recognize him at first.
The celebration, when the tribe learned who she was, and the appreciation bestowed upon Lewis and Clark for returning her, is hard to completely express.
Whenever I start to think about what she went through, from her capture and slavery among the Hidatsas, to her being taken as a wife by Charbonneau, traveling across largely unknown lands with people whose language she didn’t speak, to finally being reunited with her family, it always makes me emotional.”
—u/livingunique
7.“One of the girls in the Donner Party was fed her dead mother and told afterwards. They had an agreement not to feed people their family members, but they had broken off from the camp in an attempt to find rescue. She would randomly burst into tears about it at school years later. The whole story of the Donner Party is so horrible and sad, and it bothers me that it’s just used for cannibal jokes.”
Bettmann / Getty Images
8.“The Rape of Nanking in 1937. Looking up photos of what the Japanese did there left me silent for a while.”
9.“Virginia Woolf’s suicide and the note she left behind make me fucking weep like a baby. Just the way she expresses sentiments of happiness and love to her husband, but also her guilt and struggle with mental illness; it just kills me.”
George C. Beresford / Getty Images
—u/urticadiocia
10.“RMS Carpathia was the first ship to arrive on the scene when the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. Every one of the Titanic‘s 705 survivors was rescued by the Carpathia, which made a tremendously heroic effort that night in the North Atlantic.”
Universal History Archive / Getty Images, Bettmann / Getty Images
—u/RexSueciae
11.“Most if not all of the astronauts aboard the Challenger survived the explosion. It was the crash into the water that would have killed them.”
Museum Of Flight Foundation / Getty Images
—u/MarchKick
12.“When Alexander Hamilton’s eldest son died, his second child, Angelica Hamilton, had a mental breakdown, and she never recovered. Sometimes, her family would walk into a room with only her in it, and she would be speaking to her dead brother.”
—u/meenakshi96
13.“The oldest recorded name for a cat was from Ancient Egypt. The cat’s name was ‘Nedjem,’ which means ‘Sweetie.'”
Universal History Archive / Getty Images, Bildagentur-online / Getty Images
14.“Dangerfield Newby, one of the free Black men who died in the raid on Harper’s Ferry, had a letter from his enslaved wife on his person. He had been working to buy her and his children, but her owner kept raising the price.”
Kean Collection / Getty Images
15.“The end of this Sappho poem:“
“Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless days we spent might be made twice as long.
I prayed one word: I want.
Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time.
That quote always makes me tear up.”
16.“There were approximately 300 infants and children who were murdered in Jonestown, being forcibly fed or injected with cyanide. I feel so much pain for all the victims, but the kids in particular make me ache with despair.”
Bettmann / Getty Images
17.“The story of Hachikō, the dog who waited patiently for his owner nine years after his death.”
Jhvephoto / Getty Images
—u/-eDgAR-
18.“Pictures of a box of wedding rings taken from the corpses of Jewish people in concentration camps. It just makes me so sad that the only remembrance of their spouse (who could be dead for all they know) was stolen from them, and they were unceremoniously buried without their ring. Then the rings were carelessly stored in a wooden box to be melted down.”
Roberts / Getty Images
—u/CapaxInfini
19.“That one of the world’s most talented mathematicians died around the age of 40 because he was gay, and lived in a country that had made it illegal to be. Alan Turing.“
Pictures From History / Getty Images
“He was one of the people we can thank for having computers today, and that WWII didn’t last longer.
I wrote that he died, but really, he was ordered by court to be chemically castrated for being gay. It’s probable that he died by suicide because he wasn’t able to work under the influence of his ‘medication.’
It’s also of note that he received a post-mortem pardon from the Queen of England in 2012. Imagine it being illegal to be gay. Quite unthinkable in modern times.”
—u/neihuffda
“He didn’t just die, he was chemically castrated after he helped the Allies crack the Nazi code.”
20.“The fact that Anne Frank died just shortly before the camps were liberated. Every time I read her diary or other books about it, I get this weird sense of hope for her (even though I know how it ends) because of the timing.”
Photo 12 / Getty Images
—u/abigaillevya
Feel free to share your own makes-you-cry-every-time historical event in the comments. Or, if you want to write in but prefer to stay anonymous, you can check out this anonymous form. Who knows — your story could be included in a future BuzzFeed article!
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
Dial 988 in the United States to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The 988 Lifeline is available 24/7/365. Your conversations are free and confidential. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. The Trevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ youth, is 1-866-488-7386.
