North France --  Beaches at Normandy

 

Every American should visit the beaches, especially Omaha, where thousands were lost in the morning of June 6, 1944.  Depicted in countless movies and in myriad pubilcations, no amount of treatise can hope to instill the sorrow, the aged respect, the revered notice to humanity that surrounds the cemetery, the beaches, the air itself. 

 

We followed the presumed hours of my father-in-law, who parachuted into an inky sky and immediately sunk into the muck of an unknown river.  As dawn crept into grays and gunshot, Germans captured him.  He lasted out the war in a Polish prison.   We travelled roads and amazed at signs and towns made famous from those nightmarish days.  We scanned horizons for bridges and monuments, lingering quietly at the bridge at La Fière, spend an hour at a café with an eighty year old woman survivor.