My husband is a huge history buff, especially when it comes to World War II. He knows all the players, battles, aircraft, troop movements, and statistics like the back of his hand. For years, one of his bucket list dreams was to visit the Normandy Beaches — the very site of the D-Day invasion — to finally see the battlegrounds he’s long pictured in his mind and seen in countless movies and documentaries.
While I share a curiosity about history, my interest is more tentative. I enjoy museums and stories, but sometimes, history gets too close for comfort.
We’ve visited WWII museums in the U.S., seen pictures, equipment, and battle diagrams. But being in America, we are physically removed from these places. Most of the action happened far from our shores.
In France, in Normandy — in Bayeux, Caen, Saint-Mère-Église, Omaha and Utah Beaches — I walked among the German pillboxes, gazed up at the sheer cliffs soldiers had to scale, and stood in the church square where airmen were mistakenly dropped. The reality was powerful and deeply moving.
What surprised me most, though, was my visceral reaction inside certain museum exhibits. The Nazi Swastika flags, photographs, and harrowing displays of hatred, destruction, and the systematic murder of Jews overwhelmed me. The sheer scale of evil was staggering, and it made me feel weak-kneed, lightheaded, and triggered in a way I hadn’t expected.
Although I’m a non-religious cultural Jew and have always known some of my relatives were killed during World War II, the reality never really hit me — not until I stood in those museums in France, staring it all in the face. The war ended only 18 years before I was born, so it felt surprisingly close in time — barely a generation removed — even though it had always seemed like such a distant past.
Standing there, surrounded by the evidence, the horror felt real and immediate.
I am still processing these feelings and reading more about the individual stories from that time to better understand and honor the memories. The Jewish population has never fully recovered from the devastation, and even today, there remains a stigma attached to being Jewish. How can that still be possible?
This journey reminded me how vital it is to remember history — not just the dates and battles, but the human lives forever changed and lost. It is a symphony of death, a somber echo of lives lost that demands remembrance.
Title inspiration: “A Symphony of Death” is a phrase drawn from Dave Matthews Band’s song “Last Stop,” a haunting reflection on the ravages of war.
