16 January 2017--The Beaches of Normandy
The rain-slicked parking lot spread before the tour group as we disembarked. Signs in English (first) and French (second) urged visitors to treat the place as hallowed and sacred. We sloshed toward the entrance of the museum, shoulders hunched against the cold, and looked at the low-slung building. It was modern, sharp, and in some ways sterile, but it housed the museum and entrance to the cemetery itself.
Gayle and I made our way through security and then walked downstairs. A short film clip speaking about some of the soldiers who died during the fighting rolled. We sat and listened, their names fading almost immediately. One man, however, was 32 when he left the British coast, gone to help heal the wounded. He died there, not far from where we sat, learning his story, and watching photos of him playing with his children flickered on the screen.
I'm 33.
Tears began to surface as the import of the place continued to swell within me. I swallowed them down and resumed my feet. While the museum was interesting--complete with a year-by-year, and even hour-by-hour explanation of what happened to make Operation: Overlord come to pass--I wasn't really there for the exhibit. I was there for memory's sake.
As we walked out, a spartan hallway greeted us. From an overhead speaker came a solemn voice, a recording, reading aloud every fallen soldier's name. We didn't pause, because we weren't listening for any specific person, but I've thought about it since then. If it only takes one second to read each name, then it would take almost 3 hours to read the entire list.
Then it repeats. All day. Every day. It is in this way that we use our technology to remember those we could never know, but acknowledge the sacrifice and who was lost.
Before exiting, there was a BAR (the rifle the GIs would use), its bayonete affixed, placed in the ground, muzzle downward. A helmet rested on the stock of the rifle. The display was behind glass--an homage to the only grave marker that some men will ever have--those whose names could never be read by a solemn voice through a speaker in a spartan hallway.
Outside, the drizzle continued, light and unencumbering. Though colder than that day in June, the sky was skull-gray, the sun unwilling to shine through. To our right, the English Channel crashed morosely against the cliffs, the tomb of hundreds as restless as it has ever been through the course of human history. To our left, meticulously cared-for lawns and pathways guided us toward a bluff from which we could see over much of Omaha beach. I could only imagine the water down there, a frothing red then but an unremarkable tan now.
We turned from the bluff and headed into the cemetery itself. The marble crosses, punctuated with the egalitarian hand of death with Stars of David, marched in true military fashion, row-by-row, and in formation. Over nine thousand bodies lay beneath our feet. Many were named; some were not.
I was struck at the silence of the grounds, knowing that 73 years before, it was one of the loudest places on the planet. The bombs, the bullets, the bayonets--all biting and tearing, all shrieking amid the screams of despair and death--had all fallen as silent and still as the graves that grew, poppy-like, from the fertile ground beneath our feet. I thought of the bravery of the men who leaped into that inferno, who drowned or died before firing a shot, who poured their lives into the sands of a foreign shore, their mother's name on their lips as they slipped beyond this mortal coil. The words of many of the crosses--too many--said HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY A COMRADE IN ARMS KNOWN BUT TO GOD.
I thought of my sons, and how I would feel if they were buried there. If I had to pick one of those nameless crosses and share it with hundreds of other grieving families, a sociability of mourning.
Then my heart cracked and I wept silently, the sky's soft drops echoing my own.
I composed myself but poorly and walked through, using the feebleness of imagination to craft the cords of empathy between the present and the life-forming past. The sadness there was similar to Sachsenhausen, but different. I felt some hope there. I do not think that it's because one was filled with victims and one was filled with warriors--I believe I visited victims in Normandy, too. But the hope was that, despite the flaws of America, I stood in a place where we, as a country, sought to do good. I struggle to say their sacrifice was "worth it", but there was a sense of redemption in that cemetery I had not felt in the other places of bloodshed I've seen.
I had, before we left for Europe, shared with my students a quote from Shakespeare. It was written 350 years before the war, and its context is different than what I read here, but I find it remarkable. Here's the full passage:
The gaudy, blabbing and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea;
And now loud-howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night;
Who, with their drowsy, slow and flagging wings,
Clip dead men's graves and from their misty jaws
Breathe foul contagious darkness in the air.
Therefore bring forth the soldiers of our prize;
For, whilst our pinnace anchors in the Downs,
Here shall they make their ransom on the sand,
Or with their blood stain this discolour'd shore.
Those last two lines I read aloud to Gayle, my voice ragged and breath uneasy. "Here shall they make their ransom on the sand,/ Or with their blood stain this discolour'd shore." So many of them made their ransom, surviving to tell...and remember. But many others stained the discolored shore, their bodies blanketed by waves to "go to graves like beds", known but to God.
These men died some 39 years before Gayle and I were born. They gifted a world lifted from oppression out of duty and hope and maybe even some naivete. I am a religious person, but I don't know of a time I more deeply hoped that my faith would be rewarded than while standing on that spot. I know the crosses were not meant to indicate the actual religion of the one buried--and though there were 149 Stars of David, we're certain more of the men there were Jewish than their dog-tags claimed--but I have a hope for a universal resurrection, when the myriad graves might unfold and the treasures we lost in the hideousness of war could return to those who loved them best.
I worry that too often, it is the fact that it was American lives, American sacrifice, American deaths that makes us remember the wars. And though there is value to that, I have to remember that the sadness I feel at that sacred site is applicable to all the soldiers who served their country. I may have cared more because they were Americans, too, but I weep for the dead. If a world can be at war, then a world can mourn. And, perhaps, it can one day be at peace, too.
The rain-slicked parking lot spread before the tour group as we disembarked. Signs in English (first) and French (second) urged visitors to treat the place as hallowed and sacred. We sloshed toward the entrance of the museum, shoulders hunched against the cold, and looked at the low-slung building. It was modern, sharp, and in some ways sterile, but it housed the museum and entrance to the cemetery itself.
Gayle and I made our way through security and then walked downstairs. A short film clip speaking about some of the soldiers who died during the fighting rolled. We sat and listened, their names fading almost immediately. One man, however, was 32 when he left the British coast, gone to help heal the wounded. He died there, not far from where we sat, learning his story, and watching photos of him playing with his children flickered on the screen.
I'm 33.
Tears began to surface as the import of the place continued to swell within me. I swallowed them down and resumed my feet. While the museum was interesting--complete with a year-by-year, and even hour-by-hour explanation of what happened to make Operation: Overlord come to pass--I wasn't really there for the exhibit. I was there for memory's sake.
As we walked out, a spartan hallway greeted us. From an overhead speaker came a solemn voice, a recording, reading aloud every fallen soldier's name. We didn't pause, because we weren't listening for any specific person, but I've thought about it since then. If it only takes one second to read each name, then it would take almost 3 hours to read the entire list.
Then it repeats. All day. Every day. It is in this way that we use our technology to remember those we could never know, but acknowledge the sacrifice and who was lost.
Before exiting, there was a BAR (the rifle the GIs would use), its bayonete affixed, placed in the ground, muzzle downward. A helmet rested on the stock of the rifle. The display was behind glass--an homage to the only grave marker that some men will ever have--those whose names could never be read by a solemn voice through a speaker in a spartan hallway.
Outside, the drizzle continued, light and unencumbering. Though colder than that day in June, the sky was skull-gray, the sun unwilling to shine through. To our right, the English Channel crashed morosely against the cliffs, the tomb of hundreds as restless as it has ever been through the course of human history. To our left, meticulously cared-for lawns and pathways guided us toward a bluff from which we could see over much of Omaha beach. I could only imagine the water down there, a frothing red then but an unremarkable tan now.
We turned from the bluff and headed into the cemetery itself. The marble crosses, punctuated with the egalitarian hand of death with Stars of David, marched in true military fashion, row-by-row, and in formation. Over nine thousand bodies lay beneath our feet. Many were named; some were not.
I was struck at the silence of the grounds, knowing that 73 years before, it was one of the loudest places on the planet. The bombs, the bullets, the bayonets--all biting and tearing, all shrieking amid the screams of despair and death--had all fallen as silent and still as the graves that grew, poppy-like, from the fertile ground beneath our feet. I thought of the bravery of the men who leaped into that inferno, who drowned or died before firing a shot, who poured their lives into the sands of a foreign shore, their mother's name on their lips as they slipped beyond this mortal coil. The words of many of the crosses--too many--said HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY A COMRADE IN ARMS KNOWN BUT TO GOD.
I thought of my sons, and how I would feel if they were buried there. If I had to pick one of those nameless crosses and share it with hundreds of other grieving families, a sociability of mourning.
Then my heart cracked and I wept silently, the sky's soft drops echoing my own.
I composed myself but poorly and walked through, using the feebleness of imagination to craft the cords of empathy between the present and the life-forming past. The sadness there was similar to Sachsenhausen, but different. I felt some hope there. I do not think that it's because one was filled with victims and one was filled with warriors--I believe I visited victims in Normandy, too. But the hope was that, despite the flaws of America, I stood in a place where we, as a country, sought to do good. I struggle to say their sacrifice was "worth it", but there was a sense of redemption in that cemetery I had not felt in the other places of bloodshed I've seen.
I had, before we left for Europe, shared with my students a quote from Shakespeare. It was written 350 years before the war, and its context is different than what I read here, but I find it remarkable. Here's the full passage:
The gaudy, blabbing and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea;
And now loud-howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night;
Who, with their drowsy, slow and flagging wings,
Clip dead men's graves and from their misty jaws
Breathe foul contagious darkness in the air.
Therefore bring forth the soldiers of our prize;
For, whilst our pinnace anchors in the Downs,
Here shall they make their ransom on the sand,
Or with their blood stain this discolour'd shore.
Those last two lines I read aloud to Gayle, my voice ragged and breath uneasy. "Here shall they make their ransom on the sand,/ Or with their blood stain this discolour'd shore." So many of them made their ransom, surviving to tell...and remember. But many others stained the discolored shore, their bodies blanketed by waves to "go to graves like beds", known but to God.
These men died some 39 years before Gayle and I were born. They gifted a world lifted from oppression out of duty and hope and maybe even some naivete. I am a religious person, but I don't know of a time I more deeply hoped that my faith would be rewarded than while standing on that spot. I know the crosses were not meant to indicate the actual religion of the one buried--and though there were 149 Stars of David, we're certain more of the men there were Jewish than their dog-tags claimed--but I have a hope for a universal resurrection, when the myriad graves might unfold and the treasures we lost in the hideousness of war could return to those who loved them best.
I worry that too often, it is the fact that it was American lives, American sacrifice, American deaths that makes us remember the wars. And though there is value to that, I have to remember that the sadness I feel at that sacred site is applicable to all the soldiers who served their country. I may have cared more because they were Americans, too, but I weep for the dead. If a world can be at war, then a world can mourn. And, perhaps, it can one day be at peace, too.