Rememberance

This past weekend, we packed our day bags and took a coach bus up to Normandy, the northern region of France. We left Paris at 8:15am and drove for hours through the beautiful French countryside, full of sheep, every kind of cow EVER, fields of corn and wheat, unfamiliar trees, all lying beneath a bright blue sky scattered with the slight whisper of clouds. I alternated between sleeping, daydreaming, writing in my journal, and zoning out to music, all the while enjoying the landscapes that whizzed by us in the bus.
Around 11:30am, we finally reached our destination: the Caen Memorial. While its main purpose is to educate people about World War II and the way in which it devastated France, it serves also as a memorial for those who died in the war and as a center for the promotion of peace. The day began beautifully, excted, optimistic for all we would learn and experience this weekend, but the day would soon grow dark. Literally and figuratively speaking. We began with the September 11th exhibit which described in detail the events of September 11th, who was involved, and what followed that day. It was quite heavy to begin with, but then there was the room in which there was a video playing, renewing the imagery in our heads of the Twin Towers falling, and showing the happy smiling faces of people who used to work there, as well as reproductions of the hundreds and thousands of posters that had been hung at the site by families and friends searching for their loved ones. Thinking about Frank Reisman and the others who were lost that day, I started crying, and 1/4 embarrassed, 3/4 overwhelmed, I left the exhibit. Then, we were scheduled to watch a film recounting the war beginning with D-Day and ending with the returning of France to its people. It began with smiling, waving soldiers from both the German and American armies and then conttinued by showing live footage from D-Day. So many young men were shot down at Normandy Beach by German planes that it looked to me almost as if they had choreographed it so that every other American/Canadian soldier
was to lie down one at a time. It was terrible. And then I cried again. And then I cried agin when the film showed all of the beautiful historic villages and cities of Northern France reduced to rubble, as were many other places in the world during wars of the past. The film ended, obviously, on a happy note. Yay France is returned to the French people, but I personally couldn't handle looking at the museum exhibit recounting the horrors of the 2nd World War quite yet. And so, Jacqueline and I went to look at the Noble Peace Prize gallery instead. There were beautiful gardens outside to commemorate the American and Canadian soldiers that lay their lives down to take France back, and then there was this crazy weird museum/gallery about the Nobel Peace Prize with some information about Alfred Nobel and the award winners. Eventually, I mustered up the courage to go through the museum and read all the stories of children whose entire families died off one by one, leaving them alone, of young men and women in German resistance movements who were sentenced to death, of Hitler's vision of what he freakishly saw as a more perfect world...
When we finally left the museum and loaded up the bus, it was silent. Nobody wanted to talk. I don't think I even heard one person cough or sneeze. Not a word was spoken for the next couple hours on the bus to our next location. People were sleeping, writing in their journals quietly, zoning out with their heads against the windows, but not a single word. Then, we rolled up to our next location: Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery. I have to admit, I didn't even want to get out of the bus. But one by one, we stumbled out into the drizzling rain and I chose to walk straight down to the beach instead of going to the cemetery to start. It was beautiful. As strange as it is to think that so many people had been killed on the sand upon which I stood, there was a breeze upon my face, beautiful blue-green waters at my feet, and friends around me taking pictures, daring to smile and laugh a little, looking at the various seashells and creatures that had washed up on the shore. I guess that the cemetery gave us some closure. We walked in little groups and pairs, just talking, dragging our feet in the sand, touching the surprisingly warm water of the sea, and we eventually felt at ease, relieved, content as we remembered that at least the poor souls who are buried beneath the fields of white crosses and Stars of David were not lost for a lost cause.


This post doesn't sum up the weekend, but I will write about Sunday's adventures in a separate entry and leave you with these quotes from the Caen Memorial that I found to be quite powerful:


"La paix n'est pas un cadeau que Dieu fait aux hommes mais un cadeau que les hommes se font à eux-mêmes"
(Peace is not a gift that God gives to mankind but a gift that we create ourselves)


"Le contraire de l'amour n'est pas la haine / Le contraire de l'espoir n'est pas le désespoir / Le contraire de la santé mentale et du bons sens n'est pas la folie / Et le contraire du souvenir ne s'appelle pas oublier / Mais n'est autre que, a chaque fois, l'indifférence" (The opposite of love is not hate / The opposite of hope is not dispair / The opposite of sanity and good sense is not insanity / And the opposite of remembrance is not to forget / But nothing else, in each case, but indifference.)


-Elie Wiesel