While visiting the British cemetery in Normandy, we had one of those encounters you could never plan.
An elderly French gentleman approached us. I think my granddaughter Addie was probably what first caught his attention. He was a small man, maybe five feet tall if that, a little hunched over with age. He smiled, talked to Addie, and then began talking with us.
His English was very limited, and my French certainly wasn’t going to help much. I tried using the translator on my phone, but he didn’t seem particularly interested in it. He wanted to talk to us himself.
Somewhere in that conversation, we realized he had been a boy living in Caen during D-Day.
From what we could understand, he would have been around 12 to 15 years old at the time. He talked about the “boom-booms,” using his hands and expressions to help us understand what he remembered. He also mentioned that his brother had been killed around that time, although with the language barrier, we couldn’t understand exactly what had happened.
What struck me wasn’t so much the details. It was the person standing in front of me.
We had spent days visiting the beaches, cemeteries, museums, bunkers, and towns connected to D-Day. Everywhere you go in Normandy, there are reminders of what happened there more than 80 years ago.
But this was different.
Here was a man who hadn’t read about it in a history book or seen it in a documentary. He was there. As a child.
The explosions we learn about as troop movements, bombing missions, and artillery barrages were the “boom-booms” of his childhood. The casualties we see represented by thousands of white headstones included people from his own community and, apparently, his own family.
And all these years later, there we were, an American family visiting Normandy, standing in a cemetery talking with him while he smiled at my two-year-old granddaughter.
I don’t know his name. Because of the language barrier, there are parts of his story I’ll never know. I wish I could have understood more.
But maybe that’s part of why the encounter has stayed with me.
History can sometimes feel like dates, places, battles, and numbers. Then, every once in a while, history walks up to you, smiles at your granddaughter, and starts telling you about the “boom-booms” he remembers from when he was a boy.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
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