On June 6th, 1944, Angelo Paradiso crossed the English Channel at twenty-one years old to fight valiantly for the Allied cause with the 90th infantry on Utah beach. On May 14th, 2018, I crossed the English Channel at twenty-one years old under very different circumstances to remember the sacrifices made by men and women of all nationalities, particularly my grandfather Angelo. When Poppy was alive he always spoke proudly of his Purple Hearts with a grave allusion to the hell he lived through in Hedgerow country and greater continental Europe. Entering Normandy with a familial American perspective prompted shock in me when I witnessed the way the French museums deal with the Second World War. In retrospect, I should not have been shocked by the France-first perspective portraying the war as one for French liberation rather than European liberation. They suffered bombings, occupation and oppression by the Nazi regime in a way Americans cannot understand. While this doesn’t excuse their disregard for the errors of Vichy France or failures in the interwar years that lead to the fall of France, it does explain it.
What does still offend me is the Airborne museum, or as my comrades and I dubbed it “Ronald Reagan saved the world wax museum”. The historically imperative Sainte-Mère-
Église turned the tragic historic events into a tourist trap complete with a tasteless model of a paratrooper hanging off of the church in town Center. The museum diminishes the horrors of D-Day to an iPad gimmick complete with games and Disney World-like 4D exhibits. I could only imagine walking away that my grandmother, Dorothy Paradiso, in a traditional Italian-American-from-New-Jersey fashion, would not stand for making a spectacle of her husband’s suffering.
There is a gross difference between memorializing and sensationalizing. To see a museum commissioned by Americans themselves sensationalizing the sacrifices made by their own people was disappointing. Tourism internationally poses the difficulty of maintaining authenticity against the economically reasonable outcome of making a culture a caricature of itself for monetary gain. In a place like Normandy particularly, this is a line that should be tread carefully.
Regardless of any nauseating experiences, it must be mentioned that visiting the Omaha and Utah beaches was a humbling experience. Angelo Paradiso died in October of 2014 at 93 years old after living a very full life and seeing many important things. Upon his death my grandma presented my sisters and I with a letter he wrote to us relaying his experiences in World War II. My historian’s brain was immediately interested, but I found that I could not separate myself from the personal connection of the situation and perceive the letter in a scholarly fashion. As an American collecting shells from beach and exploring museums and memorials, I found myself facing a similar dilemma. My time in France was an important experience for me to secure family ties rather than textbook national identities. History is more than treaties and battle strategies, it is guttural human experience. I leave for Paris, diving deeper into Europe just as Angelo did, and ponder my week in Bayeux with a lot to think about, I’m feeling pride in my family, my country, and humankind, rather than disgust at the way the French handle their history. I’m sure Angelo Paradiso would be proud of the scholarly discourse and emotional response his proud history inspired in myself and my comrades. I am left with a yearning to return to the beaches to delve even deeper into their implications, and a feeling that someday I will. As Poppy would always say “this isn’t goodbye, it’s see you later”, and I’m sure at some point in my life I will be faced with these dilemmas later on.