Day 6: Wednesday, June 7 – Normandy – Beyond Saving Private Ryan I am ashamed to admit it but I did not get really interested in World War II until I saw the movie. I had seen The Longest Day, Ike, A Bridge Too Far and many other war movies but to me, they were
Day 6: Wednesday, June 7 – Normandy – Beyond Saving Private Ryan
I am ashamed to admit it but I did not get really interested in World War II until I saw the movie. I had seen The Longest Day, Ike, A Bridge Too Far and many other war movies but to me, they were historic events being retold, often parts of a much bigger picture and frankly, I understood only so much of it. We studied very little of WWII in high school and I am sure I looked at it then as just another school subject, without ever realizing the importance of it for the life I have been able to lead.
Then I saw the reviews for Saving Private Ryan, how close the film was to the real thing, whereas other war movies had been almost “sanitized” for our viewing comfort. I remember thinking, ok, that’s going to be a two boxes of Kleenex movie (after all I choke at Christmas time when they play the Hallmark cards commercials!). So I went to a noon show in the middle of the week and sure enough there were only 11 of us in the whole theater!
By the end of the landing scene on Omaha Beach twenty minutes into the movie, I had no more tears to shed and my heart was broken. By the end of the movie, when the now older Private Ryan kneels in front of a cross at the Omaha Beach American Cemetery I was so choked up that I couldn’t get out of my seat as the credits started to roll. I had to reach my late forties to finally realize the sacrifices made by so many – and so very young – people and the incredible military feat that WWII really had been. I was so hurt (so many young men lost their lives), so ashamed (that it took me so long to even be thankful), so thankful (that these young men were mature enough and brave enough to go into battles they knew were going to be so hard) and so full of regrets (wasting so many precious years not being interested) – all at once.
It took until the very last frame of these credits for all 11 of us to finally get up and exit the theater. As we looked at one another, our red eyes and look on our faces said it all: we had just experienced some kind of “enlightenment” moment that would stay with us forever. I resolved right there and then to learn more about WWII and to go to Normandie and retrace D-Day on my next trip to France. In the meantime the History, the International History and the Biography Channels were about the only channels I watched for the next 3 years. And I would need to look up the encyclopedia often!
You have to realize that I was born and raised in Alsace-Lorraine, this part of France that was French or German depending on who won the many wars over the centuries. I lived close to the German border so we were the first to be invaded as the German armies began to occupy France. I lived close the Ligne Maginot, close to Bastogne, a few miles from Baccarat, Nancy, all landmarks of WWI and II, close to a small concentration camp with a crematorium that used to be a destination for field trips when I was a child.
My grandparents and parents fought and lived through WWI and WWII and you know what, I never asked them about it! And they never told us! It was as if everyone wanted to put the past behind them and start living again. Now, all my grandparents, most of my uncles and my father are gone, I can’t ask them anymore what it was like to fight during the war and/or live under the occupation. My mom was a young teen during the war and at the onset of the occupation her family went to live on a farm in the Southwest where they stayed for most of the war, and she says that life wasn’t bad there, that her parents probably protected her from the realities of the war, much like in It’s a Wonderful Life, I suppose.
I am thinking about all of that as we drive towards Normandy after leaving Versailles. The girls and I talk about Saving Private Ryan which is their first and only point of reference with respect to WWII. I tell them what I know about the war, what little I learned in school: the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, his plans for the Third Reich, his hatred for Jews, gypsies and other races, the Holocaust. I tell them what little my grandparents told me about life during the occupation (they have trouble understanding the very concept of “occupation” by a foreign nation), about the concentration camp where I used to go on field trips, about the bullet holes they will see on my little village Town Hall when we get there in July.
We talk about the tendency of so many people who lived through it to try to forget it, and the tendency of the post-war generations to ignore the extraordinary sacrifices of the Allies to whom they owe the freedom they have always known.
We will stay in Falaise tonight because it is the last day of this year’s D-Day commemorations (56th anniversary) and there isn’t a single hotel room left in Caen…