bktheirregular

A long time ago, probably almost half my lifetime, my family went on a vacation in France so that either my mother or my father could attend a scientific conference in Lille. We had a fairly extensive itinerary, including visits to Belgium and various points in France.

The biggest excursion, though, was a trip to the Normandy coast. We were driving; our visit was to the eastern-most beaches, Sword and Juno, where the British and Canadians landed, as opposed to the westernmost beaches, Utah and Omaha, where the Americans hit the ground. It was a sobering experience, to see fortifications still in place, and the cemeteries where the casualties of the assault lay. For my father, who'd probably known people trying to get ashore through the Atlantic Wall, it was sobering.

For my mother, it was a bit more like a pilgrimage.

She was in German-occupied Greece at the time, wondering whether anything would stop it. Now, remember, Nazi Germany didn't have a very good record with occupations; if one partisan attack succeeded, they'd wipe out an entire village in retaliation - it happened more than once in Greece, and they were in the habit of grabbing random villagers and shooting them as reprisals for a single German being killed by partisans. My mom almost lost her father to one of those reprisal executions.

So, for her, D-Day was the first step towards liberation. The Tommies and the GI's and the Canadians saved her home, saved her people, and quite possibly saved her life.