On 6th June 1944 the long-prepared Anglo-American landings began in Normandy, opening the way to the final stages of the Second World War. They brought the French people not only liberation, but more violence and destruction. Danièle Philippe provides a riveting account of her family’s experience of the liberation of France. Her story begins in 1939, when she was just ten years old – a happy and innocent witness for whom the unfolding events at first took on the nature of a children’s adventure. The sometimes distressing experiences she describes came to shape her thinking. Just a few miles from Omaha Beach, where Allied troops landed, her ‚perfectly normal family‘ had encounters with Americans, Belgians, German, British and Canadians, and from this grew the hope for international understanding in the future – a hope that contributed importantly to her writing this book. Danièle Philippe is less concerned in these descriptions of her childhood with reporting the military action than with human encounters and the reactions of those affected, which she conveys with sympathy and sensitivity. This authentic account, compiled with the help of diaries, letters, conversations with eyewitnesses, and unpublished documents, casts light on the human side of an inhuman war. This unusual aspect renders the book a lesson in what it is to be human in such times.

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