Touching the Unspoken Past

On that summer day along the coast of France, the sea breeze took the edge off the noon sun. Bernières-sur-Mer was a cozy town with cafés and tourist shops lining its streets. It lay behind them. The fresh air and the steady rhythm of the surf were almost hypnotic, as if the place itself insisted on calm. It might have brought peace even to his weary soul — if he had been willing to accept it.

They had reached the shore — side by side, an older man and a young woman, their closeness softened by the quiet sea.

Decades had passed since he had last stood here.

She walked beside him — young, proud, sixteen. Strikingly beautiful, the kind that caught people off guard. He admired her charm — and the strength, the restless mind beneath it. There was something defiant in the way she held her chin, as if the world still owed her explanations.

He noticed the looks — the quick judgments in strangers’ eyes, assuming she was far too young for him. He didn’t care.

That day, even time seemed to step aside. There was space to speak — about themselves, about the world, about fears and hopes that rarely found their way into words.

He reached for her hand. For a brief second, she seemed ready to pull away… but didn’t.

He slowed his pace. He remembered the promise he had made to himself — never to come back to this place.

Was it worth breaking that promise for her?

At first, he did not know. People always want to believe in something better. But life rarely asks what we want.

Still, he had returned. And for now, it was enough simply to walk beside her.

Memory is a strange thing.

He does not remember how it all began.

Memory pulls out fragments, as if deciding on its own what to keep and what to erase.

He remembers Otto’s voice. Sharp, strained, almost calm in its anger.

“Schnell! The belt!”

Franz reloads quickly, as he was taught. His fingers work on their own, without the mind’s involvement. He feeds the belt. The machine gun rattles, the air vibrating as if the concrete itself were trembling with each burst. The gunfire sweeps the beach. People fall unevenly, like tin soldiers brushed aside by a careless hand. He watches too long, as if spellbound, and only then turns away.

Otto does not look at him. In fact, Otto rarely looks at anyone at all. He lost his brother, went to the war in ’43, fought on the Eastern Front, and was wounded several times. For him, war was not an event — it was an environment. There was nothing you could talk about with Otto. If you showed humanity — what would later be called weakness — he would laugh. Not maliciously. Simply like a wolf at a lamb that had wandered into the wrong place. And if you played along, you became “one of the guys” for a few minutes.

The fighting around Bernières-sur-Mer turned into a slaughter in those hours. The beach would later be called Juno. For Franz, it was simply the coast near Bernières — concrete, sand, a resistance point. Was it a defense of his country? He could never answer that question. At the time, it seemed like the only possible action. Later — it no longer seemed like anything at all.

Franz had grown up in a poor family.

He did not last long at the university’s Faculty of Education — he lacked money and confidence, but returning home was not an option. He eventually found work in a city library, as an assistant, sorting catalogues, stamping books, sometimes hiding the undesirable ones.

He was fourteen when the books burned.

He called it foolish. Wrong. Others nodded. No one moved.

He did nothing — simply hoping it would not happen. Then he stood there, helpless, watching the flames take the words.

Franz had no exemption when the war began. Nor did he have the health to be among the first. He was mobilized only in the spring of forty-four.

He had never imagined he would end up on a beach, feeding a machine gun as it tore through the shoreline.

Later, he found himself no longer certain it was worth fighting for his own life. Would the war end? Would it last forever? Everything seemed to lose meaning — just as, under Otto’s machine-gun fire, the lives of the Canadian soldiers lost theirs, collapsing into broken tin figures in the sand.

Franz remembered the first years after the war. The trials of the Reich commanders. The mandatory educational meetings for soldiers. Excursions to places no one had ever visited voluntarily before.

When he was taken to Auschwitz and led through the gas chambers and mass graves, he saw the falling tin soldiers again. Only now they were different — not cut down by gunfire, but worn thin by exhaustion.

He kept asking himself the same question: What if?

What if he had not simply stood at the machine gun? What if he had become not a participant, but part of the resistance? Was his life worth living after everything that had happened?

Sometimes he thought it would have been easier to die at the front. Easier still to die trying to stop something larger than his own fear.

But he did not die. He lived.

Now, standing on the bright sand that yielded underfoot, her warm hand resting trustingly in his, he recalled the previous evening.

She had seemed different. Softer at times. Then suddenly distant.

On the train, they barely exchanged a word. Fields and villages slid past in the copper light of sunset. When they did say something, it was about trivial things — tickets, the timetable, whether the window let in a draft. Ingrid read for most of the journey, turning the pages a little too quickly, as if the words were not really holding her.

After the compartment had fallen quiet and the rhythm of the wheels grew steady, he finally broke the silence.

“I’ve never told you… I once swore I would never come back there,” he said, looking into the dark reflection in the window rather than at her. “Not even once.”

She didn’t interrupt.

“But lately…” He hesitated. The words felt heavier than he expected. “Lately I feel like I’m losing you. And I don’t know how to reach you anymore.”

Silence. Only the rails answering beneath them.

“You don’t have to believe my stories,” he went on. “I understand that. Words are easy. People lie with words. Or hide behind them.”

He lowered his eyes to the glass of tea cooling in his hands.

“I don’t know if this place can change anything. But maybe… maybe standing there will help us begin again. Not to agree. Just to understand.”

She closed her book slowly.

“I’m not promising anything,” she said.

“I know.”

Silence stretched between them — not hostile, not warm.

She lay back against the thin pillow, staring for a moment at the dim ceiling light.

“I think it’s time to sleep,” she said at last.

He nodded.

The train carried them on through the dark.

When she fell asleep, he watched her familiar features — the ones he knew by heart. He should have felt relief. Instead, the past stirred, closer than it had been in years.

Memory threw back Otto’s shouts, the rattle of the machine gun, explosions, the desperate orders to retreat. The landing had been successful. The Germans were forced to abandon their positions despite prolonged resistance. He remembered running, stumbling, retreating — and then something struck him with tremendous force. No thunder, just impact — and darkness.

He realized he had been badly wounded only later, waking in unbearable pain in a hospital ward.

It was there he learned that Mark — the only decent boy in his unit, kind, naive, dreaming only that the war would end — had been killed. They had been friends. On guard duty they joked about Otto and the other hardened soldiers. They dreamed. And now his dreams… Where were they? Why had they existed?

Franz was alive. Many were not. The wounded often remained where the bullets found them.

Surgeries. Bandages. Nervous doctors. Exhausted but polite nurses. Months of recovery.

Later he was told that his mother had received a death notice for his father, who had fought on the Eastern Front. Soon after, she herself died of illness.

He remembered Germany in the early thirties — zeppelins, construction sites, radio broadcasts filled with hope. Why had this war been needed? To lose everything that had been built?

In his sleep Otto returned. The machine gun. The sharp commands of officers. The soldiers falling on the beach. Again and again. Every night.

Sometimes his fevered mind replayed Otto shouting after the retreat:

“Come on, Franz! Let’s go back! Let’s shoot some more! Just reload faster!”

“No!” he would cry out. “Never!”

He would wake drenched in sweat, trembling, needing long seconds to understand where he was.

Bernières became a cursed place for him.

Even years later, he would turn the page when Normandy appeared in the news.

And if a map lay open, he did not look long at the northwestern coast.

People close to him learned not to press the subject.

Franz sat on the lower berth. Lights drifted past the window.

Memories came uninvited.

When the war ended, he was discharged and allowed to return home.

On his first day back, he stepped into the bakery in their neighborhood. The air was warm and thick with the smell of fresh bread.

Marta stood behind the counter — thin, tired, her sleeves rolled up. She wiped her hands on her apron, leaving pale streaks of flour, and looked up.

“Grüß Gott.”

He hadn’t heard the old Bavarian greeting in a long time — the one that sounded almost like a blessing. At the front it had almost disappeared — swallowed by commands, by shouting, by fear.

“Grüß Gott,” he replied.

She held his gaze a moment longer than necessary.

For the first time since the hospital ward, he felt something loosen inside him.

That was how they first met.

All through the war she had worked at a baking factory, taking two or three shifts a day, like so many others. She hated the war. The last years had been marked by depression and hunger. She had once promised herself she would never marry at all — and certainly not a soldier.

But Franz was not the one she could even call a “soldier”.

They began seeing each other almost every day until they realized they could not live apart.

Franz was alone — no parents, no relatives. On her side, only her mother attended the wedding. Her father, too, had died in the war.

They made plans for the future — a future without ominous shadows.

And then she was born — Ingrid.

It felt as if her birth erased the past and opened the future. Life seemed permanently changed. The house was filled with smiles, with more guests. Later both he and Marta found new jobs — comfortable and promising.

They traveled south with Ingrid, to the mountains, swam in lakes…

Good times always seem like they should last forever. They did not notice when something began to change.

She grew kind, yet often intense — her ideas shifting quickly, her opinions firm but still open to discussion. Franz and Marta had grown used to her sudden certainties.

One evening after school, Ingrid answered sharply at dinner. She looked withdrawn. He no longer remembered how the conversation reached the point where she asked, with the kind of certainty that does not question itself:

“Have you ever thought that we all betrayed our Country?”

“What are you talking about, dear?” Marta asked.

“They show us camps and guilt. But not why people believed. Not what they felt.”

She paused, her eyes moving from Mom to Dad.

“If you hide that, isn’t it propaganda too? If it was so evil, why did so many decent people believe it?”

Franz felt a coldness spread in his chest.

“And everyone says we started the war,” she went on. “But no one talks about what pushed us into it. As if history just began in ’39. As if nothing happened before.”

“You really believe we were forced into it?” he asked carefully.

“Why not?” she said. “You know people were tired. You know they wanted strength. I think they believed they were defending something bigger than themselves.”

Franz and Marta exchanged a glance. They had spoken about those years before — carefully, never in detail. Some memories were shared. Others, too painful, were rarely touched.

That night it was a difficult conversation.

And that night, they did not convince her.

Later, in the morning, after Ingrid had almost overslept for school, he found printed pages sticking out from under her mattress. He did not know exactly what they were, but he recognized the tone. Among the pages he caught familiar phrases — about renewal, strength, destiny betrayed. The words were updated. The structure was not. At times they had even sounded logical.

Yet he knew where they led.

He could still hear their echo in the dark.

Neither reason nor Marta’s tears nor even a school visit to a camp memorial moved Ingrid. She said it was all staged.

And then he made his decision. To return to that cursed place with her. She agreed, certain that even there she would prove she understood politics better than he did.

The train arrived in Paris at seven in the morning. They had time to walk a little and have breakfast at a café.

“Your grandmother was born here,” he said quietly.

“I know, Dad. But she became German, and I’m proud of that.”

“It’s a pity you never knew her. She loved France,” he paused, “until the end of her days.”

Ingrid gave a faint, skeptical shrug.

“You weren’t at her funeral.”

“No,” he answered softly. “I was at the front. Not by my own choice. They could send me away. But they couldn’t take the wish to be with her in her last days.”

She was silent for a moment.

“And Mark,” he continued, “was born here too. His parents moved to Germany before the First World War. They loved the culture of our country.”

“I remember your stories about him,” she nodded. “He seems like a good guy to me. Just weak.”

Franz did not respond to the last word.

As they walked back past the ticket line, they heard a child’s voice — loud and unembarrassed.

“Mom, if the fascists hadn’t been defeated, would I have been born?”

“Probably not. I wouldn’t have been born. And your father wouldn’t have been either. Our grandparents wouldn’t have survived.”

Ingrid exhaled sharply — but she said nothing.

And now they were here.

Small waves rolled in and withdrew again, calm and unhurried.

Something had shifted. He hoped they had begun to listen. She did not agree — but she did not argue.

Ingrid walked a few steps ahead. She picked up a small shell and turned it in her fingers.

“I didn’t tell you this morning,” she said. “I dreamed you were lying here. In the sand… half buried. Among many others. I was calling you.”

She did not finish the thought.

“I have to show you something else,” he said, his voice unsteady.

They walked inland.

She asked questions — about the landing, about the retreat, about what he remembered.

He answered as if he had waited years to speak.

The farther they moved from the shore, the weaker his voice became.

She began to understand that wherever he was leading her, it cost him more than he had expected.

The fields widened. Rows of pale headstones rose from the grass.

She stepped forward between the rows.

Franz remained where he was.

For a moment he did not dare move.

Then he followed, uneasily.

Ingrid touched a stone, as if touching the past. She read a name. Age — eighteen.

“Where were they from?” she asked.

“Canada.”

She looked across the rows and sighed.

“I saw the pictures… Here it feels different.”

“There were others along the coast,” he said.

“How many graves?” Ingrid asked, her voice uncertain.

“More than two thousand.”

She looked at him.

“And how many of them…”

She did not finish.

He understood.

“Too many,” he said almost in a whisper.

Silence settled between them.

“We were almost children too,” he added. “Many of us.”

She touched another stone.

“I didn’t go because I believed,” he went on quietly. “I went because I was afraid. Most of us were. And when fear becomes stronger than conscience, a person does things he cannot later speak about.”

They stood in silence.

“You asked why we didn’t talk about it,” he said at last. “Because it wasn’t something to be proud of.”

The sky above the cemetery felt unreal.

He had not wanted to return. But he had come.

Ingrid stepped closer.

“I told you I wanted to convince you.”

He nodded.

“Maybe I… changed my mind.”

She looked away briefly. For a moment he saw how much she had grown.

“I… get you,” she said. “I needed to come here.”

She took a breath.

“Next time,” she added, “let’s go somewhere together. With Mom… All three of us.”

The breeze moved in from the sea.

“And you know what?” she began, hesitating for a moment.

“I may disagree with you,

but I… I love you, Dad.”

She looked at him, and for an instant he saw the light in her eyes from years ago.

Then she stepped closer and took his hand herself.

They stood there without words,

without distance,

without the need to prove anything.

The sun slipped behind a cloud, and the shadows softened.

They were simply together.

Again.