"Paris Martyred, Paris Freed"
178 rue de Courcelles, Paris 17e We see them, as we stroll past the typical Parisian façades of buildings, along the boulevards, the plaques with dates of late August, 1944: “Here fell such and such for France” usually with an age so young as to bring tears to the eyes. And we wonder about them, that youth who gave their lives not knowing whether liberty could ever return to their beloved homeland. For they never gave up, contrary to popular belief. We might ask ourselves too, how a nation that had lost 1,4 million to the war, over ten percent of its young men, might, twenty years later, have a chance to fight off the booted, Fascist menace of the Nazis? This is how, one fine June day in 1940, the Wehrmacht army goose-stepped down the Champs Élysées. Paris began a four year long nightmare...
