Current mood:	sleepy
Entry tags:	france, ww2 ceremony

65th Aniversery of Charles De Gaulle's Messege Of Resistance
We went to a little ceremony in Guegnon honoring WW2 vets today. Normally we wouldn't attend that sort of thing, but the person leading it was a friend of our adviser/project leader, he was 14 at the time of the broadcast. There was a small parade of flag bearers, they placed a floral display on the WW2 monument, and some ladies sang a memorial song and then the La Marseillaise. My French is not good but it was an interesting experience anyway. At the after party (wine) they toasted us as "The Four Americans" (if I ever have a band, there's a name) at the after party. It was a local experience that was cool to have. It freaked me out a little bit trying to understand folks (I did not even try to have a conversation with folks, my French is not up to that- good grief I'm aggravated by my lack of capacity for languages, I've tried to work on it for years and years and it just never clicks... I'm resigning myself to not being able to get it). Anyway, it was weird but good, and it got me thinking about WW2 and my grandfather a little bit. Lucien, the ceremony leader, spoke to us afterward about the concentration camps and his father being taken away by the Germans. He never saw his father again. Horrible. My grandfather liberated a concentration camp during WW2, I really should find out more about that.

We did find out about a collection of artifacts that is held privately from one of the folks at the reception. Its a sad thing that the elderly are dying off and these private collections are just being tossed, never cataloged, never used in research, gone.