When the evening news came on last night, Brian Williams was standing in the American cemetery in Normandy, France.  Somehow, as he rattled off the evening’s headlines, my ears went deaf.  As I sat safe and warm in my living room and stared at the lines and lines of white crosses behind him, an unbidden image of the young soldiers buried under each one, and thoughts of the families who lost them, consumed me. I found myself crying real tears for all those thousands of men I never knew. With those images still weighing on my mind this morning, I’ve run across an outstanding article written by Evelyne Holingue in honor of the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Outstanding enough to share.

Here’s an excerpt: Both my parents grew up in small villages in Normandy, an hour away from the coast. Children during WWII, they understood early on the meaning of the words “enemy” and “occupant” and the need to be resourceful, but they remained children, acting like children, despite the war. My dad and his friends invented their own coded language that they used when passing German soldiers on their way to school. With polite smiles and nods, they were in fact insulting them. When school closed because of the frequent bombing, they wandered around and got to know some of the soldiers who having left kids at home missed them and . . . Read the rest here: Histoire Through Histoires.