Historical Traveling
A year and a half ago I got a call from an old paratrooper who had
been slightly acquainted with my father during the invasion of
Normandy in 1944. He mailed me a copy of a photo I had never seen. It
had been clipped from Newsweek in 1944 and showed my father in
uniform carrying a wounded French boy. The old paratrooper said that
his friend Lucien, in France, had located the retired electrician who
had been the 10-year old pictured in my Dad's arms. To make a long
story short, my wife, my sister and I found ourselves in Normandy in
June of 1999 for some of the events commemorating the 55th
anniversary of D-Day.
We had the privilege of meeting Louis, the robust electrician and his
family and many other French people, who welcomed us fervently. Even
young Normans are quite aware of the events of that war, which for me
are only scenes from war movies. As we stood one afternoon on Omaha
Beach looking up at the bluffs the invaders had had to capture I
could see the huge sacrifice of the young Allied soldiers who had
died there by the thousands. But this was one of the few somber
moments in our trip, as we shared many delicious meals and visited
the spot where the picture was shot of Louis and my father.
On our last night in Normandy at Louis's house, as we Americans
tried, to everyone's amusement, to learn "La Marseillaise" in our
fragmentary French, I was feeling as if we were completing a circle
in history. My father, who died in 1973, would have had a great
time.
Josh
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