Normandy

Those who forget the past are condemned to relive it.
Santayana

This weekend is the observation of Memorial Day in the U.S. It is timely for me as my husband and I just returned from a National Geographic trip that visited the sites in Normandy, France for the June 6 invasion by Allied Forces 70 years ago.

We traveled with a wonderful group of people, many of whom had spent years studying the events of D-Day.  Each of us took away new learnings and understandings. The numbers involved in D-Day and the events following were staggering as were the number of casualties. The logistics in planning the event were overwhelming, the number of things that went wrong was huge, but ultimately the objective was achieved – the end of an evil regime that was killing millions upon millions of people. Many, many lives, civilian and military, were lost in achieving that objective……war is a brutal way to resolve issues. So many of US deaths were young men who had only begun to live their lives. I read The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan to gain some perspective before our trip. It focused on the individual soldiers and their stories and I highly recommend it.

It is important that we not forget the lessons of history lest we repeat them………and there were many, many lessons from that dark period in the history of our planet.

I highly suspect that some of these photos that I captured along the way will end up in my art quilts – my way of remembering. 🙂