Omaha Beach

Ok so I am officially home. My Paris adventure was AMAZING. Since I got kind of busy/lazy about posting the last couple of weeks I thought I'd tell about one of the highlights of my trip that I never got to mention-- Normandy. I got the chance to take a day trip to Omaha beach one Friday and see the American Cemetery. It was a great experience.

First we went through the visitor's center. The visitor's center started with a short film that told you a little bit about the war and some of the soldiers. It gave exerts from there old letters and told you a little bit of their personal stories. The rest of the museum gave you more history and let you see things in context of the bigger picture.

These are some of the the different soldiers and their stories.

After I finished going through the Visitor's center I went to see the cemetery. My friends and I arrived just in time for the guided tour. Our guide was great. She told us a lot of the stories behind the different names. Since our group was all girls she made sure to take us by all the nearby woman graves and tell us their stories. There are only four women buried in the American cemetery.

The markers tell the name of the soldier, and their rank, but they never say the soldier's age. They decided to leave it out because all the soldier were so young when they died.

The cemetery is marked with crosses and stars of David depending on what the soldier listed for his religion. They used to also mark there religion on their dog tags as well. This, of course, was very dangerous for the Jewish soldiers. They know that many falsely registered as Christian to protect themselves, so there should probably be more stars in the cemetery than there are right now.

This is the memorial reflection pool. On a calmer day you can see the entire memorial reflected in the water. When they first built it people kept throwing coins in the water. The government did not want to make money off of the deaths of soldiers so they painted the bottom of the pool to keep people from throwing coins.

This is a close up of the statue in the center of the memorial. It is framed by two olive trees to symbolize peace.

We finished the tour by looking at the wall of the missing. Many of the relatives of these men never stopped looking for them. Our guide told us about one woman in particular that never lost hope. She eventually found him-- in the cemetery. I am not sure about the whole story (whether he was buried under an anonymous grave marker, or under a wrong name or something like that) but, he had been buried under a cross, not the Jewish star he should have been under. Then we said goodbye to our nice tour guide and went down to the beaches. It was weird to know you were standing in the same spot as one of the most infamous battles of World War II.

Anyways that's about it. Normandy was a great trip. I'm glad I got a reminder all the sacrifices those soldiers made for us.

Currently: Excited that Vista is out of my life... my computer is running 3x faster