- Magazine
- From the Editor
Why it’s important to hear stories from WWII’s last living survivors
To mark the 75th anniversary of the war’s end, people who lived through it—a dwindling population—recount their experiences and memories.
In 2005, my husband, Geoffrey Etnire, and I went with his parents to visit Normandy, France. We knew that Geoff’s father, Bob, had been involved in some way in D-Day, but like many men of his generation, he never spoke of it.
When asked for details about what happened, Bob would only say that he went over “later.” No one pushed the point, and the family came to assume that “later” meant days or even weeks after the first D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.
Standing on Omaha Beach, we found out how wrong we were.