D-Day: They too remember
June 5, 2003 - The Houston Chronicle
PARIS—For months, the question has loomed in the minds of many Americans: “Have the French forgotten?”
Now, with today’s 59th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of France at hand, most French would answer, “Non.”
Whether through words, deeds or observances, many French seem as grateful as ever to the Americans, as well as their British and Canadian liberators, who invaded the beaches of Normandy early on June 6, 1944, and began the Battle of Europe that eventually crushed Nazi Germany’s armies.
For some French, the invasion has even become part of their family histories, with stories about the soldiers handed down from generation to generation.
During the emotional debate that preceded the Iraqi war at the United Nations, several media outlets and elected officials in the United States had a field day vilifying the French for their staunch antiwar stands.
One U.S. newspaper replaced French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin’s head with a weasel’s in a photo from the U.N. Security Council. Some editorial cartoonists suggested rolling up the American cemeteries in France to bring the war dead back home. A few editorial writers and politicians even derided the French as the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”
For many French, though, the anniversary of the Normandy invasion has little to do with global politics. Genevieve Brame, an author who splits her time between Paris and her village in Normandy, calls the anniversary “part of my heritage.”
“This is something that happened here where I live,” she says. “My grandfather was the mayor of an anti-Vichy village in Normandy, and my parents helped hide English parachutists in an attic (before the invasion), and my mother was the only person in the house small enough to pass through a trap door to bring them food.
“These are the kinds of stories that we grew up with.”
Many ceremonies are planned today to commemorate the invasion in which some 5,000 ships, 11,000 aircraft and 150,000 servicemen took part, and to honor the memories of the 4,000 Allied soldiers who were killed on the beaches. French and Allied officials intend to visit nearly every major village in the region that sits on the English Channel.
But Laurent Beauvais, a Normandy regional official, stresses the human side of the events. “This anniversary is simply something we feel inside of us,” he says.
After today’s official ceremonies, Beauvais plans to visit the Falaise Pocket Museum, which commemorates the last decisive battle in Normandy. “I’m going with my family,” he says.
Brame, the author, recalls that her family saved letters from soldiers written during the war. “When we were young,” she says of the letters, “this was how we learned of the horrors and the suffering of the war.”
“Participating in the anniversary is part of my family’s history,” says Brame, who devotes several pages to D-Day in her Living and Working in France series of books, intended for children. “Every year, my family would do something to commemorate the anniversary.”
This year, Brame is bringing an American to ceremonies organized for Sunday by a group called Les Fleurs de la Memoire, or The Flowers of Memory. Its 3,500 members regularly bring flowers to the graves of American soldiers buried in France.
“I’m tired of the perception that France is ambivalent,” says her guest, a 27-year-old New Jersey native named Jason Levin.
“At this time, when so many in the States think the French don’t care any more, I’d like to work on repairing the damaged link between the two countries,” says Levin, who served as an intern at the U.S. Embassy in Paris in 1996 and now organizes job fairs in Europe.
Beauvais, the Normandy official, says that his town, Argentan, was nearly destroyed by heavy fighting in August 1944.
“Even in the architecture, we are reminded of what happened,” he says, “with the remaining old buildings next to the ones that were built to replace those that were destroyed.
“The traces of memories of this terrible time are present in our lives,” he says. “From one generation to another, the memory of these events are transmitted, and these are traditions we must continue to pass on.”
