France is hosting commemorations and celebrations all summer long, to mark the 70th Anniversary of the D-Day landing which turned the tide and changed the face of the world, from the pressing, looming darkness into the exhale of this light of day.
It’s terribly easy to not remember from here in the USA, given the atrocities, the carnage, the loss, is not on our own soil.
But for ALL connected, by birth, blood or otherwise, and we all are;
GIVEN those who HAVE gone before, we cannot forget.
In Berlin at the entry to the Holocaust Memorial, marked in stone, are the words of Primo Levi:
‘It happened. Therefore it can happen again …’
At Dachau, the haunting sounds that follow you …
In Normandy, ‘N’oublier Pas.’ Never forget …
Going there? It comes alive. The earth holds the dying, the sorrow, the ash of a cause gone right.
Living there? It stays alive. It calls one home.
Traveling afar to pay unpayable homage — is the telltale vapor-trace of return;
acknowledgement over and over again that it was not in vain.
And now, right now, the French are hosting the paying of respect across the land.
