Everyone thought that I would be bored with the trip as we would be touring museums, traipsing through cemeteries and visiting battle sites. The whole trip came as a pleasant surprise. First of all, the Normandy beaches have been turned into a tourist paradise for all the thousands of British and Americans who come to pay homage to their fighting heroes.
The museums are actually interesting, the stories very moving and the actual battle sites very pretty green fields. I couldn’t get my mind around the fact that so many young men died in terrible battles on long white beaches or in beautiful fields covered in red poppies. A lot of the beaches have now been built up with holiday homes and restaurants for the tourists. One wonders who would like to live in these places but life goes on and 65 years later these beaches are a holiday maker’s paradise.
The scene is different in southern Belgium where the Battle of the Bulge took place. Here we were very close to the German border and many Belgium residents in this area speak German and welcomed the invading German army. The museums whilst proclaiming their neutrality are more German orientated. They have many donations of uniforms, weapons, medals etc from the German soldiers themselves. The dioramas depict scenes of German troops in their well made winter uniforms and excellent equipment making the whole war seem much more real to me. It sent shivers down my spine to see the models in the museums with the waxen faces copied from actual soldiers in their German uniforms driving their kuegelwagens, motorbikes or tanks or directing civilians through bombed out buildings.
Whilst watching a movie on the Battle of the Bulge, we were lucky enough to meet an old American soldier from the 106th Infantry who was visiting Europe for the first time since the war and to listen to his story.
Surprising enough in all the museums we visited only two had any reference to Jews being deported to concentration camps. One showed deportation papers and a yellow star and another had clothes from the concentration camp and photographs of families leaving at the station.
The Jewish museum in Brussels [it was open on a Saturday and we had to pay an entrance fee!] also does not have enough information about the Jews’ plight in the war.
After traipsing after Dennis through forests looking for foxholes that are still there after so many years, it was a pleasure to share the roads with Harley Davidsons and antique cars as everyone is out on a Sunday looking for a restaurant in the country to eat lunch or an antique fair.
I was amply compensated after viewing all the war scenes by our visits to lovely little ports at Hornfleur
and Point et Bessin on the North Sea
and Mont St Michel, a beautiful Abbey built on an island in the sea.
We also visited the Bayeux Tapestry and the exquisite gardens of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet.
Brugge and Brussels are cities that are not to be missed and the quaint old town of Monschau on the German border was a trip through time that I loved.
The highlight was a stay in a real castle in Brugge with its own moat, towers and family portraits from centuries ago.
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