When
Valérie informed me that the English exchange students would be taking a trip
to Caen near the end of the stay and had extended the offer to me, I jumped at
the chance. (Well, more exactly, I did a
little jig.) After getting excused from
my two classes that Friday, it was set.
Now all I had to do was board a bus with 31 kids I didn’t know and three
adults who I ate lunch with once.
We
all spoke English and French, right? We
at least had that in common?
I
thought as much until I was speaking with Valérie and one of the teachers,
Hugh, before the bus left, and the bus driver walked up to tell Hugh about
evidence of a “keg party” from the trip the day before. First, let me just say that both Hugh and the
driver, Clive, are English, and I know Clive is from Liverpool. I say this to reassure myself that they were
speaking English, because I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I turned to Valérie, asking in French if she
could lend a sister a hand, but she shook her head and smiled vacantly; she
hadn’t understood either.
This
was going to be an interesting day.
After
a brief delay due to a miscommunication with a correspondent’s family, we
headed off to Caen.
More
than one student threw me strange glances, especially after I asked them what
they’d eaten so far and heard my accent, but I figured their teachers had warned
them that the school’s English assistant would be coming with them. Not so much.
I didn’t learn until the end of the day that their teachers hadn’t said
one word about me; in fact, the student’s exact words were, “So who exactly are
you, anyway?” Awesome.
I
tell this story now to explain the slightly awkward atmosphere of the entire
day that began with the two-hour bus ride.
I spoke with their French assistant, Estelle, for almost the entire
ride, but the students around us tossed more of those oblong looks my way. Estelle and I traded stories about teaching
our native languages, what we missed about not being in our home countries, and
to where we’ve travelled. Estelle is on
her third of five years in England as a French assistant, and she is working
towards a teaching certificate which requires her to learn a third language,
Spanish in her case. According to the
other teachers, she is more than prepared to uproot from her mother country and
replant herself in England, preferably, but anywhere but France,
generally. Although we spoke in French
the first time we met, we spoke in English this time, and I was selfishly
relieved: her English (including accent) was fabulous, and I would only
embarrass myself if we spoke in French, though she did say I was super awesome
at imitating the French students’ accents.
As
always when you start out a journey late, we made good time and arrived at our
destination early: Le Mémorial, or the Museum for Peace. They let us in early so that we could have
extra time wandering around the museum before we made our 1 PM date with the
movie about the landing. Throughout the
whole museum, I felt like I was in this space between visitor — free to roam,
take my time, and step in front of as many reading people as possible — and
chaperone/sheepdog, herding the kids and making sure no one got lost. (Doubly confusing as I still had no idea the
kids didn’t know who I was, and they kept ignoring my sheepdog tendencies.) I eventually fell into a pattern of following
around the same teacher, Hugh, and a gaggle of kids who actually cared about
learning; two of them compared the English, French, and German translations to
each other.
Museum of the Peace. Unassuming exterior; rockin' interior. |
Of
course, as a museum about D-Day, it also chronicles the entre-guerre/time between the world wars as well as all aspects of
World War Two. It starts at ground level
with the end of World War One, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and the belle epoche, what France calls the
roaring 20’s. With each successive
display, you spiral downwards, down underground, around a giant white dome that
looks like a mini IMAX theater. The displays
become more and more serious, disturbing even, with mini TV screens showing
Hitler’s troops marching through Berlin in perfect blocks, like black and white
moving Polaroids: innocuous, harmless. A
swastika flag hangs from a fake window, display cases show off an original copy
of Mein Kamf. Then Hitler invades Poland, and you walk into
that white dome to find a narrow walkway illuminated by a low, eerie blue light
and built with perfect acoustics.
Everything seems all around you all the time, and you can hear every
shoe shuffling, every fabric rustling.
Quite simply, you feel unbalanced and under attack.
IMAX bubble and spiral downwards. |
I was suspicious of the bubble from the beginning. |
You stop those disembodied hands! |
Creepy inside of IMAX theater! |
From
there, you progress through both World War Two history and France’s experience
first fighting then collaborating, then doing both at the same time. See, every American likes to point out that
France surrendered to the Nazis in about four seconds, but actually France was
cut almost in half during most of the war, with the occupied border drawn
diagonally across the country through the near-central point of Vichy, which
was where the collaborationist government was based. Only half of France was truly occupied during
the first few years of the war — unfortunately the part that had also been
pulverized during the first go-around at a world wrestling match — and the bottom
half, while technically “free” until November 1942, was governed by a puppet
administration sympathetic to the Nazi cause.
Ostensibly, Germany occupied France even if the former let the latter
“govern” itself so that Germany could focus on that war thing. Defending itself simply wasn’t logistically
possible for France in the face of years of bone-crushing poverty and
joblessness, and add to that the former WWI hero of Verdun Marshal Pétain declaring that he’s going to form his
own government in Vichy so don’t you worry your pretty little head, and I
really can’t blame the French people for not knowing which way was up. The collaboration part’s a different story,
but that’s neither here nor there.
The
museum follows the war both chronologically and by theme with exhibits about the
Battle of Britain, propaganda, and daily French life. The baby Haz-Mat suits were particularly
touching.
You know it's a good museum when they have half-bombed walls. |
Legit baby Haz-Mat suit. I checked the label and everything. |
Uniforms! |
Display about the actual D-Day. |
TV screens as pictures? God, they're good. |
I was pleasantly surprised
that the exhibits about the French resistance were relatively small and
scattered, for while there was an
active resistance, and they were involved in Germany’s eventual expulsion, I
thoroughly despise when countries (including the U.S., mind) toot their
patriotic, fight-the-Man horns louder than they should. In terms of the actual population, the French
resistance was tiny, just like any other resistance, just like the colonists
who wanted to separate from Britain; don’t blow the ratio out of proportion.
The
students (who cared) asked good
questions. One asked about continued
anti-Semitism in France, which led Hugh and me to discuss the family Le Pen,
the Front National, and the
increasing anti-immigration sentiments, and they seemed generally surprised
that a blatant fascist made it through the first round elections and could make
it through this time if the right isn’t careful.
After
taking a rest to sit and watch original footage from the Nuremburg trials (at
which my grandfather was present, he likes to remind me), I met up with Estelle
and the rest of the kids who didn’t take the museum as seriously as we did; I
overheard one saying that they had hit the gift shop over an hour ago. That means they spent about a half hour in
the museum itself. UGH KIDS. Sometimes I
wonder we have them.
The
film was about D-Day itself and used a split screen to depict preparations on
both sides of the war and with only a soundtrack: no words at all. What I didn’t know before the museum was that
about five beaches were actually invaded, and while the Americans, British, and
Canadians were clearly the ones who executed the operations, they didn’t all go
in together: the U.S. hit Omaha and Utah beaches first, followed by the British
at Sword and Gold beaches and then the Canadians at Juno beach, all within an
hour of each other. I’ve seen the
pictures, and I’ve seen the footage, but both have come out of context; after
wandering through a museum dedicated to a war that “horrific” doesn’t even
begin to describe, they have context.
You feel your heart pounding, the adrenaline rushing through your system
and doing what it does best, but you don’t know who you’re more worried for:
the Allied forces charging into the breach, or the Germans who have no idea
what’s coming, or everyone because, really, you know how most of them ended up.
Though
most of the kids were thoroughly subdued after that experience, grumbles of
hunger eventually won out, and we hightailed it to the bus and our next
destination: Gold Beach near Arromanches and our lunch spot.
If
at all possible, I think I fell in love with France all over again. Each new aspect of this countryside I see, I
immediately construct a house there in my mind, and the cliffs overlooking the
beach were no different. The Normandy
coast is just savage enough to be rugged and civilized enough to make you
wonder why it’s not more savage: huge cliffs of tall, waving beach grass footed
by sandy beaches that jut and dip as they stretch to the horizon. It doesn’t smell like the sea: it smells like
clean, like the absence of pollution, like your lungs have been freed from a
rubber band. At this beach, huge slabs
of concrete poke out of the ocean, waves gently breaking around them: the
remnants of a Mulberry harbor (sweet code name), built to usher supplies to the
rapidly advancing Allied front. The French
left the remnants the harbor out in the ocean as a testament to what happened
at this beach, and when some of the students stood next to the beached slabs
and I saw their actual scale, I must say that I had a new appreciation of the
logistics of war.
Beach and the town below. |
Parts of Mulberry harbor. |
The
teachers gave a thorough warning to be back at the bus in an hour and fifteen
minutes, and the kids scattered like iron filings from the wrong end of a
magnet, some to chill out at one of the lookout points, others to the beach,
others to the little town below the cliffs.
Estelle and I parked on the edge of the cliff alongside the path down to
the town and ate a leisurely lunch. We
were joined by Hugh, who nodded out towards the ocean with binoculars in
hand. “Some of the kids are swimming.”
“Yes,”
I answered. We’d seen a group of three
girls go in, but they were nowhere to be seen.
“Hopefully they didn’t drown.”
“No,
no, not them.” The binoculars found his
eyes again. “The boys are swimming. Well, skinny-dipping, actually.”
Estelle
and I both shot up. This was the
ocean! Along the Normandy coast! In March!
I would like to say that my mind immediately shot to pneumonia and
hospital visits and how this could totally not be at all my fault ‘cause I
wasn’t a chaperone, nope, not at all, but in fact, I started laughing, asking
Hugh through malicious giggles if I could take a look.
Yup. Boys.
Buck naked. In the ocean.
Side
note: I love my camera.
HEE. |
The
novelty eventually wore off, and Estelle and I meandered down to the town so I
could get a closer look at the beach and the giant pylons, but we soon ran out
of time and had to head back up to the bus so we could get to our last stop:
the American Cemetery.
Yep, those are people for scale. |
I
didn’t know until we arrived that technically the American Cemetery is American
soil, and when Estelle told me so just outside the entrance, I replied, “I’m
home! For an hour, at least!” We then
guffawed more loudly than probably appropriate considering the location and the
fact that we’d just scolded the children for doing the exact same thing in the
bathrooms. But it’s true! All American cemeteries in foreign countries
are sites maintained and administrated by the United States, so my feet were on
American soil for the entire hour of our visit, and the cemetery reminded me of
every single picture I’ve seen of Arlington National Cemetery in Washington,
D.C.
There’s
a welcome center that I think introduces the cemetery and the U.S.’s role in
the D-Day invasion, but we skipped it because we only had an hour to spend
before the cemetery closed. Then, you
follow a circuitous path along the beach before approaching the cemetery from
the side. Up some stairs, and to the
left is a monument and to the right stretches the cemetery, entirely
symmetrical and perfectly manicured. A
long reflection pond leads to the lawn, twin flag poles on either side, and
then the thousands of graves: thousands of names of men and women who died in
the D-Day invasion and the fight to free France from the Nazis. The graves face the west and, therefore, the
United States mainland, and that’s the point I found the most touching: that
even though their bodies are on a different continent, they still have an eye
on home.
Monument. |
Monument and reflecting pond. |
Those
kids that didn’t get it before
finally got it now; the fact that all
these crosses and Stars of David marked bodies, people, that died in a historic event that, until this very moment,
remained in a book, finally sunk in. One
girl turned to me and asked, “Are there bodies
in all these graves?”
Well,
yeah. There’s no easy way to break that
to you, hon.
(Right
after that was when they finally asked who the hell I was, and I mentally
facepalmed.)
And
this was only the American side; there were British, Canadian, French, and
German casualties that are buried along the coast in different cemeteries that,
while probably different in design are similar in solemnity. A group of us had a long conversation about
my American view of the whole thing, and I told them about my grandfather
fighting in World War Two, and one of them stopped me with a hand on my
arm. “Omigod, he’s not in here, is he?!” I shook my head while biting back a laugh. I
forgot how dramatic Anglophone teenagers can be. Come to think of it any teenagers, really; I
just probably don’t understand the French ones.
As
we toured the cemetery (“can we walk
on there?!”), we talked of living in a strange country, whether their
correspondents were good at English, and about the French language in
general. We saw the guards lower and
fold the flags, handing one to a group of veterans decked out in trucker caps
and safari vests: my view of a traditional WWII vet, because that’s what my
grandpa used to wear when I was little.
When we heard the clear tone of a lone bugler singing out Taps across
the cemetery, we made our way back towards the monument and the exit.
The
monument chronicled with pictures filled with arrows and in all three languages
(French, English, and German) just how D-Day went down, and the semi-circle
wall behind it listed the names of all the soldiers reported missing, including
their rank, company, and state of origin.
I took pride in the fact that I saw some of the kids who blew through
the Mémorial in a half hour take pictures of that wall.
Even
though the day was somber and could have easily slipped into a state of
melancholy, the day ended on an upswing. The entire region, rambling fields and rolling
cliffs and calm sea, exudes a sense of calm awareness, like a wizened elder
recovering from a long illness: the scars are still there, but they’re
healing. They know where they’ve been,
they have grieved, and they’re trying to move on the best that they can, even
though they know they’ll never forget, and they don’t want to forget. But you can’t keep remembering at the expense
of living.
I
hope the kids got at least a little bit of that feeling out of today.
Wow Becky, what beautiful writing. You really captured each moment. I love reading your blogs. I feel like I am right by your side witnessing everything you are experiencing. I look forward to reading more of your adventures.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Brittany! That really means a lot to me. I'm glad you're enjoying reading my blog as much as I enjoy writing it. Hope everything's going well with you!
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