JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

I spent the week before our Fourth of July in the north of France. It

was a good place to celebrate the United States. I felt a stronger sense

of my own country standing amid 10,000 graves on a hillside above Omaha

Beach in Normandy than I would have experienced at home. And I wished

devoutly that my fellow Americans who worry today about the changing

ethnic, racial and social balance in our country could be reading the

grave markers with me.

I visited with these men and women for an hour, marveling at what they

accomplished here. The names were quintessentially American in their

variety. I paid my respects to McEwen and Shanahan and Olichny and

Hernandez and Liacubuco and Kwoka. And prominent among the crosses were

the Stars of David marking Addleson and Marshach and Holztberg.

Hitler and his sycophants through arrogance and brutality tried to

cleanse the world of everyone who didn’t look and think the way they did.

Nowhere can be found a more powerful statement that such an effort

carries the seeds of its own destruction than in the names on the grave

markers of the men and women -- mostly, by the way, privates, the

humblest of the military hierarchy -- who gave their lives to defeat and

finally destroy the Hitler regime.

Gratitude to the United States pervades Normandy almost six decades

after its liberation in boundless ways not nearly so apparent in other

parts of France. So do graphic reminders of the German terrorizing of

civilians, especially in the aftermath of the Allies’ Normandy landing.

The extremities of both were unexpected to me.

My wife and I were in Normandy with dear friends who live in Provence

and met us in Paris to conduct an eight-day auto trip exploring Normandy

and Brittany. Through them, we were not only able to communicate in real

depth with the French people we met, but were also introduced to the

adventures of William the Conqueror, who departed from these same beaches

a thousand years earlier to claim the English throne. His exploits are

described in a magnificent tapestry in Bayeux that plays off nicely

against the imposing statue of Gen. George Patton that commands a square

in Avranches, where the major American breakthrough took place.

We stayed in small towns and bed-and-breakfast places in the

countryside, and almost everyone older than 50 whom we talked to had a

war story to tell us. Typical was the owner of a splendid country estate

near Caen, where Allied war correspondents -- who weren’t, at that stage

of our history, told what to write by the American military -- were

quartered after the Germans were pushed out. The dining room still holds

several of their ancient typewriters and log books, along with the ghosts

of Ernie Pyle and a dozen other names familiar on bylines from those

days.

The current owner -- who was 6 years old when the Americans liberated

his home -- told us how his grandmother saved his older brother from

German conscription by hiding him in the house. And how he had found body

parts scattered about his yard when two Allied planes, shot down by the

Germans, crashed there. And how the Germans had fled in the middle of a

meal as Allied troops approached.

But the place I will have trouble putting from my mind for a very long

time is a village called Oradour. There, four days after the Allied

Normandy landings, a company of 200 German SS troops surrounded the town

and moved into its center, herding all the residents before them. Some

400 women and children were locked into a church, and 220 men were broken

into a half dozen separate groups in various parts of the village. Then,

at a signal from the SS captain, the men were shot and the church set on

fire. Two days later, before the Allied troops reached this town, the SS

returned to shovel the remains into a mass grave. Only one woman and two

men escaped this carnage to tell of it.

Today, the town remains just as it was in 1944. A deeply moving

memorial marks it and describes what happened on that day. Only a visit

my wife and I once made to Auschwitz compared to the horror of looking

into the rubble of that church, visioning what had taken place there, and

realizing it was planned and executed with the same deadly efficiency as

the ovens at Auschwitz.

The impact of all this and the agonizing questions it poses was

brought into focus in the town square of another simple village where we

stopped for a drink. A plaque in the square told us that here a group of

townspeople had been executed by the Germans. A half-dozen young people

were hanging out, and my host asked them what had taken place here. They

hadn’t the faintest idea and seemed impatient at the question. The

Chamber of Commerce was next door, so we went in and asked the same

question. The three young staff women didn’t know either. One of them

finally ventured: “I think some people got shot.”

And so the question: Is it better, before the people who lived through

those desperate years disappear, to make sure that succeeding generations

remember graphically how it was? Or is it better that the anger and

hatred that grew from those times be allowed to dissipate with fresh

generations, free to form new and different bonds? Or should there,

perhaps, be some of each to make sure that it doesn’t happen again?

Heavy thoughts for Independence Day. But I would urge all Americans

who travel to Europe to visit the museum at Caen, where all this is

brought into perspective. And, especially, to walk among the graves in

that field above Omaha Beach. And to read the names.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.