story439.xml

story439.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-04-19

We found ourselves in Normandy on September 11 rather by accident. The four of us had expected to stay for two weeks in Brittany, but a problem with the accommodations prompted us to leave early. So we headed for Normandy, where we had expected to spend a few days seeing Bayeux and Rouen before our friends' flight home on September 13 and our flight home from Paris on September 18. Given the time of year, we took less than satisfactory lodging in a small gite in Reviers- no television, no radio, no telephone.

I'm an American historian - a New Yorker born and bred, now living in Washington, D.C. - and I had no particular interest in battle sites and we had no intention of visiting the landing beaches. But with more than a week (we'd arrived on Sunday, September 9), we decided we would see what there was to see. The town larger than a crossroads we were closest to, Courseulles-sur-Mer, we found out was the only port not closed by the Germans during WW II because it was so tiny. The code name for the landing site at Courseulles was Juno Beach, where the Canadians had landed on D-Day.

Our first stop on September 11, at around 2 p.m. (8 a.m. EST) was Arromanches, where the British installed Mulberry Harbor, the astonishing engineering feat that allowed the Normandy invasion to succeed without access to a sizable French port. Mulberry Harbor had been built in Britain, towed a hundred miles across the Channel and installed in 12 days, about midway along the Normandy coast. The prefabricated harbor permitted the Allies to supplement and provision the troops moving through France throughout the liberation of France. Pieces remain within site of the beach. We were transformed by the sheer audacity of the conception - Churchill's - and the fabulous success of the Royal Engineering Corps.

We then continued driving west along the coast, to Omaha Beach, where the Americans had landed, taking tremendous losses because the air support had not succeeded in eliminating the German bunkers. We ended our visit at the American cemetery around five o'clock. The rows of crosses, with the occasional Star of David, recall Arlington National Cemetery, while the Channel beach of Colleville-sur-Mer runs along side below the cliff. Around 6:00, we headed back to Courseulles for dinner.

We arrived at La Trottoria, an Italian restaurant on the Rue de la Mer in Courseulles, around 7. We'd eaten there before and so the staff knew we were Americans. After we were seated, the one waitress who could speak a little English asked if we had seen a television. We said we hadn't. Looking drawn, she said that the World Trade Center had been bombed and collapsed. The other waitress made a motion with her hands, which she held before her, horizontally, the bottom hand facing up and her top hand faced down - and clapped them together.

No, we said. Not possible. Yes, they insisted. The World Trade Center had been attacked and collapsed. I thought that they had watched a movie and mistaken a contrived scene for reality. The waitress who spoke a little English asked if I would like to go upstairs to her apartment above the restaurant to see the television, an invitation I accepted. Her apartment, in which her mother also resided, was tiny - a living room and dining room combination with a sofa and table that could not have measured more than 8 feet by 5 feet. But a large t.v. sat in the bookcase in the wall, playing images over and over again of the Towers in flames, combusting as if a volcano. I understood only a little of the French commentary but after watching long enough to convince myself that this was not "War of the Worlds," I went back downstairs to my companions to tell them that it was true - the World Trade Center had been attacked and collapsed.

As we grappled with this news, I felt as if I had to hear an English-language report. We left the restaurant and raced down the tiny street in the tiny town to a small hotel that also had a restaurant. We walked up to the desk and I asked the hostess in French (she didn't speak English) if she had a television with an English-language station on it. She frowned, as if the request were absurd. But then she realized that we were American and her expression changed instantly to one of compassion. She took out her reservation book, located an empty room, took us up the narrow stair, opened the door to a room, turned on the light, placed two chairs in front of the television, which she tuned to the BBC, and said in French that we should stay as long as we liked.

We stayed about half an hour, watching again in disbelief as the BBC anchors repeated over and over again the little they or anyone knew. We were stricken, but there seemed no point to staying, so we turned off the t.v., went downstairs to thank our hostess and returned to the restaurant, where our friends were waiting. We told them the little we had found out and, with not much else to do, finished dinner. I don't remember what we talked about.

At about 10:00, we realized that if we went back to the gite, we would have no information; the only radio we had was in the car. We knew from driving along the coastline that it was possible to hear the BBC from certain points. (We hadn't yet discovered Radio 4, the long-wave station, that we could hear all over Normandy.) So at 10 p.m. (4 p.m., EST), we drove to Juno Beach, tuned the radio to the BBC and listened to their correspondents in New York describe the devastation. Interspersed with the commentary were the reactions of European leaders, most particularly Tony Blair, who was all one could hope for in a leader - thoughtful, intelligent, humane, and loyal. We spent that hour on Juno Beach listening to European expressions of sympathy and alliance. Then we went home to bed.

For the next few days, we tried to get up early to get the few English language papers available, French papers when the English ones were gone. After a day or two, we discovered that we could access the web from official tourist offices in Bayeux and Caen and we spent hours reading the news, chiefly from the Washington Post website - CNN was too busy. It took us two days to get a telephone line out of France. We didn't think to go to a church, and so we had no ceremonies to console us; we just wanted to feel connected to home. Our friends left for Paris on September 12, sure that their flight would leave as schedule on September 13. They actually returned on September 18, after we did. (They both worked for the U.S. government, so their extra week in Paris was not charged against their annual leave, a little irony under the circumstances.)

Because we could not possibly get home, we spent our time visiting churches and war memorials, which seemed at least in keeping with our feelings. We visited the Canadian, British and even the German cemeteries, all done appropriately, even the last. If we could not be home, we were grateful to be in Normandy; virtually everyone (with the exception of our horrible landlords) treated us with the greatest tenderness and sympathy, none of the pervasive anti-American feeling typical of Paris. Though more than fifty years have passed, Americans are still "liberators" to the Norman French. We had plenty to see. Virtually every village along the Normandy coast has a small museum and a memorial marking an event associated with the Allied landing, and each memorial has all the Allied flags flying side by side in a row. After September 11, all the flags - not just the American flag - flew at half-staff.

We began heading toward Paris on September 16, staying at bed and breakfasts, still without television, although I had acquired a pocket radio on which we could hear the BBC almost constantly. Our last night, however, we did have a t.v., and American companions to dine with, all of us grateful for the company.

On September 18, Rosh Hashanah, we arrived as directed three hours early for our flight on American Airlines from Charles De Gaulle Airport. Three flights were leaving one after the other: to Houston, to Miami, and to Washington. Virtually all the passengers were American, the French delaying their trips under the circumstances. So about 600 of us stood shoulder to shoulder for several hours, just inside the terminal door, with no security - the most harrowing part of the trip. Once on the plane, an inexperienced and reduced cabin crew added little to our sense of well-being. The crossing was, thankfully, uneventful, but it was a big ocean that day and when we flew into Kennedy Airport, we could see the Empire State Building, holding up the sky alone.

We knew when we left Paris that we were not going to connect from New York to fly into National Airport, which was closed indefinitely. Not eager to get on a plane again in any case, we rented a car, drove to Great Neck, New York, to see my elderly father. I had originally expected to visit the following Saturday via the National-LaGuardia shuttle, but that plan was clearly impossible. We drove home the following day and went back to see him again on October 6. We also made the trip downtown Manhattan to pay our respects to the site as we had paid our respects at the American cemetery in Normandy. We couldn't see very much from the pathways laid out for visitors, but the acrid smell will not soon fade from memory.

Given my father's failing health and the closure of National Airport, in the next two months I made five car trips between New York and Washington and moved my father to a nursing home here. I had been flying the round-trip between New York and Washington twice a month for about three years; the next time I flew was March 25.

But on March 18, we traveled by train to see the memorial lights. Alas, the day was wet and foggy. I had concluded - based upon a New Yorker's experience - that the best place to see the lights would be from the Staten Island ferry (now free, not the nickel it used to cost). We took the 5:30 ferry to the barren Staten Island terminal. Waiting for the 7:00 ferry back from Staten Island, we had coffee and wine in a place called "Rudy and Dean's" near the ferry terminal. They had a big plate glass window but you couldn't even see Manhattan, it was so foggy. The waitress there talked about the friend she had lost in the Tower, a fire fighter. On the return ferry trip, about 5 miles across New York harbor, I despaired, standing outside in the fog and rain. But as we got nearer, the fog actually lifted a little. The haze made the lights seem even more spectral -- they appeared and disappeared as the boat moved toward lower Manhattan. So, in a way, the view was perfect.

I have a photograph of the Towers on my wall. I'm one of the few New Yorkers that loved them from the beginning. A fan of the Bauhaus school, I always thought them perfect in their spare and clean surfaces. The celebrations at Windows on the World over the years - the last in February 2001, a first anniversary party for a 62-year-old friend who found the love of her life later than some of us - seemed magical. I could trace the streets in my home borough of Brooklyn almost perfectly - Flatbush Avenue from the Manhattan Bridge across the whole of Brooklyn and over the Marine Parkway Bridge to Rockaway.

The photograph of the Towers is next to the photograph of Mont-Saint-Michel, off the Normandy coast, which we visited before September 11 while we were still staying in Brittany. We stayed overnight on the island and came away overwhlemed by the magnificent gesture of the statue at the peak: "The Archangel loved heights." But the human spirit of the two monuments seems to me the same: Anchored on the ground, we reach into the sky and the genius of human creativity permits us to succeed at it. Even the Nazis left Mont-Saint-Michel untouched. The attackers of the World Trade Center, taking thousands of lives, also insulted human creativity.