A Different Look at D-Day
- Carrie Lynn
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Good afternoon,
I am out of town and am finding a moment to write a post that has been on my heart for a while. My intent is to present the importance of regular people in the life of this world.
The impact of D-Day has been in my life since I was an infant. I was born in France. The events of D-Day are strewn throughout France. Before I was two years old, I had visited the cemetery for United States service men who gave their lives for the war changing assault.
Somewhere in my early life, I had mistakenly attributed the first "d" in D-Day to be code for Deliverance Day. I wasn't wrong. The events of June 6, 1944, were a deliverance of worldwide proportions. However, June 6, was not the only deliverance from the insanity of World War II and occupied Europe.
Long before D-Day was an idea, men and women throughout Europe gave their lives, homes, careers, and identities to "Deliver" countless individuals from the unnecessary cruelty of the war. Today, I am choosing six people who changed history for all of us, because of the risky deliverance they provided.
The first courageous deliverer I had ever heard of was Raoul Wallenberg. He was a Swedish architect. He was 1/16 Jewish. As the war began to take its calculated toll, he undertook to house, move, rescue, and support Jewish families in his community. He created passports, safe houses, and even worked with Nazi's to deliver 100,000 Jews from the horrors of camps and death. His capture, exile, and death are hotly debated. Yet, his work of deliverance has never been called into question.
The second deliverers I came to know, where the Ten Boom's, of the Netherlands. For me World War II history was terrorizing to study and consider. I never slept well after learning about it in school or at home. Until, I read "The Hiding Place."
The biography of the family who hid Jewish people above their jewelry store. Then the Ten-Booms were captured, arrested and sent to their own camps. With them were the guests they had been hiding. When the war was over, Corrie was the only family member left. She boldly began the tell the story. To share the light that had guided their family. Her light gave me hope for whatever lay ahead.
Miep Gies came into my life through the Diary of Anne Frank. As a lover and keeper of journals, the unique journal of Anne Frank carries a special weight to me. She kept a journal; she originally didn't intend anyone to see it. In time she would change her mind, based on a BBC wartime radio broadcast, that encouraged people to keep journals. Especially to the time they were living in.
Miep was an Austrian born employee of Anne Franks, dad, Otto Frank. Frank was a Jewish business owner, who had relocated his family to Netherlands for safety. Miep had known the devastation of war privation personally. As a child she was shipped to Vienna to live with an unknown family, due to food shortages during World War I.
As World War II ravaged Europe, a second time, Miep would use her life wisdom and knowledge to protect the Frank family and friends in the upstairs annex of Otto Franks spice shop. The arrangement worked for two years. Until a tip, gave them away. In the harried mess of the Franks capture, Miep would grab Anne's diary pages and keep them safe until Otto returned after the war. Everyone else in the family died in the camps. Eventually, Otto and Miep decided the journals needed to be shared, because Anne had a story no one else could tell.
Miep lived to be 100. She spent her life sharing the Frank family's story, with the desire that history not repeat itself.
Like most everyone who knows about World War II deliverers, I knew nothing of Oskar Schindler until Steven Spielberg's spellbinding movie Schindler's List. I confessed that I have never watched the full movie. The same little girl soul that could barely discuss the atrocities of that war, exists in my present-day self, and I can't face it that way.
By all accounts Oskar Schindler should be the least possible deliverer. Yet, it is those impossibilities that made his efforts so extraordinary. He was connected to high-ranking members of the Wehrmacht. He hob-knobbed with them easily and effortlessly. He was out for himself and only himself. Then one day, he met Itzhak Stern, an accountant, and both of their lives changed.
Together, these men helped 1,200 Jews survive the war. They rescued them from camps, provided passports, and safe employment. He, too, like Raoul Wallenberg fled at the wars end.
My final deliverer is Sir Nicholas Winton, as he is now known. He stumbled into deliverance work when he was a young stockbroker.
He was born in Great Britain to German-Jewish parents. As a young twenty-nine-year-old, he was scheduled to go on a ski trip to Switzerland, when some friends from Prague reached out and asked if he could help them with a rescue project. Over the next couple of months, he and his team arranged for the safe deportation of 669 children. He had hoped to deliver 2000 more but other countries refused to take them.
Like many of the others before him, he never spoke about his efforts. It would be the survivors who would tell his story. His story came to light in 1988, when his wife found scrapbooks from the effort. In 2003, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Like Miep Gies, he lived to be over a hundred years old. In fact, he lived to be 106. Leaving this life in 2015.
As D-Day remembrances end, I reflect on "the helpers" as Fred Rogers often called people who served, delivered, and rescued others. We may not have a war as big as World War II. But every day, we feel the embattlement and rigors of life. Though an annex or fake passport may not be necessary. The passports of kindness, consideration, smiles, and courtesy help to create "Deliverance Days" in plenty of lives. As you move along, feel free to deliver life gifts to others for its best opportunities.
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