Merci M. Macron!

On April 18 President Macron announced on US television that France will be reopened to American travelers in May or June 2021. On April 19 I was Googling flights to France and contacting my friends in France asking them to prepare a room for me. I have been waiting one year to interview 94-year-old Lucian Bertin. I first met Lucien in May 2017 and learned that he knew my father in 1944. We saw photos of my father, his crew-mates, and a teenaged Lucian Bertin. My father was an Allied Airman whose plane had been shot down over France during a bombing mission in preparation for D-Day. Lucien was a 17-year old Resistant.

During this 2017 visit, I decided to write a novel based on the true story we heard as we moved between the French villages where families had put their lives at risk to hide my father from the Nazis.

We were lucky enough to meet with M.Bertin again in September 2019 when we returned to France with the daughter of my father’s crew-mate, Joe Houlihan, and the son of crew-mate Billy Edge. Both of these visits were jam-packed with activities and schedules were tight, and frankly, it never occurred to me that this was likely the last living person who could tell me first-hand stories of those months from May 1944 until August 1944 while my father was being shuttled from hiding place to hiding place. I look back now and wonder how my brothers and I could have overlooked the obvious treasure we had stumbled upon.

Lucien Bertin in 2017 proudly wearing the medals he earned for his role in the resistance. From Left to Right:Cross of the resistance volunteer combatant, Combatant's Cross, French Liberation Medal, Medal of the Nation's Gratitude

It was while I was sitting at the dinner table of Daniel Radziminski as he told me the stories he heard from his father, Bruno, that I started to think of all the questions I had wished I had asked my father when he was still alive. Then the lightbulb went off. While in Daniel’s home, I wrote the first three chapters of The Duty of Memory and was already making a plan for a return to France in the Spring of 2020. We all know what happened to those plans.

Now with the world opening up once again, I can finally ask those questions of someone who was there. Next week I will be sitting in his home in France hearing his story first hand. What a gift this is.

1944 FROM LEFT TO RIGHT : LUCIEN BERTIN, JOSEPH HOULIHAN, YVONNE FOSSIER, LOUIS WATTS, SUZANNE LEQUIEN, WILLIAM EDGE.

75 YEARS LATER, In 2019 we recreated the 1944 photo in the same courtyard. FROM LEFT TO RIGHT : LUCIEN BERTIN, KATHLEEN ARGENTINA: DAUGHTER OF JOE HOULIHAN, PAULETTE (BEGUE): DAUGHTER OF YVONNE FOSSIER, MICHAEL WATTS & VICKI OLSEN: CHILDREN OF LOUIS I WATTS AND BOB EDGE:SON OF WILIAM EDGE

Lucien Bertin proudly wearing the medals he earned for his role in the resistance. From Left to Right :Cross of the resistance volunteer combatant, Combatant's Cross, French Liberation Medal, Medal of the Nation's Gratitude.