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A warning - the next story is about sexual assault. It will last about seven minutes. Eighty years ago, U.S. and Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy to begin the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. But that liberation came at a painful price for one French family that is only now coming to terms with what happened in the summer of 1944. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley brings us the story.
MICHELLE SALAUN: No, no, no. Yes (speaking French).
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Sixty-six-year-old Michelle Salaun walks across a field to a farmhouse in Brittany. After D-Day, American soldiers fanned out across this Western region of France and neighboring Normandy.
M SALAUN: This is a place, the farm, where my grandfather has been killed and my mother raped - August 1944 - at the end of the war with an American soldier.
BEARDSLEY: She says an American soldier shot her grandfather, Eugene Tournellec, as he was trying to protect his 17-year-old daughter, Catherine, her mother. Her grandfather left behind a widow and six children. Her mother was left with an emotional wound that never healed.
M SALAUN: This was a secret for us. All the family - my three sister and my two brother - nobody knew this.
BEARDSLEY: Sexual violence committed by American GIs in the wake of D-Day has long been a taboo subject, partly because of the huge place the Normandy Invasion holds in America's collective imagination, says Mary Louise Roberts. This professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin - Madison is one of the few historians who's consulted both American and French archives.
MARY LOUISE ROBERTS: Towards the end of the summer of 1944, there really was a problem with rape. And the United States Army, at the highest levels of SHAEF, were concerned about it.
BEARDSLEY: SHAEF was the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Roberts says in some ways, the problems were created by the Army to motivate soldiers that portrayed French women as highly sexualized.
ROBERTS: U.S. soldiers saw themselves as knights in shining armor, awaiting the open arms of French women.
BEARDSLEY: One French newspaper in Cherbourg reported rapes and murders instilling fear in families across the countryside in late summer 1944. Roberts says the U.S. command knew it had to do something to show that the occupying power was disciplined and trustworthy. So using the racist assumptions prevalent at the time, they singled out Black soldiers.
ROBERTS: They could blame African Americans, based on the belief that they were hypersexual and violent, and thus exonerate white American soldiers from accusations of rape.
BEARDSLEY: Quick military trials were set up. Of the 152 American soldiers tried for rape, 139 were Black, even though Blacks made up just 10% of the fighting force. Nearly all of the soldiers publicly executed in France by hanging - 24 out of 29 - were Black.
M SALAUN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: Behind a graveyard in Brittany, Michelle Salaun and her sisters are at the spot where 34-year-old Private William Mack, a Black soldier from South Carolina, was hanged for the murder of their grandfather in February 1945.
JEAN PLASSARD: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "Nobody in town asked for this execution," says sister Jean Plassard. "It was the liberation. Everyone was happy. This was just our family's pain."
PLASSARD: Bonjour.
BEARDSLEY: We go into the nearby house of brother Jean-Pierre Salaun and look at old photos.
JEAN-PIERRE SALAUN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: The siblings say the crime, and especially the silence around it, poisoned their mother's life and cast a shadow over their family.
J SALAUN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: But they don't blame the Americans. They blame a rigid, religious French society.
J SALAUN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "Why did we have to keep silent about the rape of our mother and the murder of our grandfather to live in peace?" asks Jean-Pierre Salaun. Such was the shame, he only learned his grandfather's first name when he was 15 and had to ask. No one spoke about him because that would have meant asking about what happened to their mother, he says.
MARIE-ANNICK GOUEZ: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "She cried at night," says youngest sister Marie-Annick Gouez. "I thought it was something we kids did to hurt her."
J SALAUN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: This is what galls Jean-Pierre the most, he says, taking out a book about their tiny town during the Second World War.
J SALAUN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "There's not a word in here about our grandfather," he says. "They even talk about how many horses were killed, but not a word about our grandfather." Marie-Annick says D-Day anniversaries are always hard.
GOUEZ: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "What can we say? " she says. "They saved France and the world. Our pain was just a drop in the bucket. What's tragic is that women are still paying the price in war." The siblings say what saved their mother was her voice. She sang at local festivals. It let her fit in when villagers shunned her, something they didn't understand as children.
J SALAUN: (Singing in French).
BEARDSLEY: In 2013, when she was on her deathbed, Catherine Tournellec Salaun told her grown-up children about the rape, one by one, though by then they knew. They say finally talking together about what happened has been liberating.
J SALAUN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: This year, on the 80th anniversary of the rape and the murder, the family gathered at the grave of their grandfather. It was the first time they had come together to honor him and their mother. The mayor was there, along with two French veterans holding flags.
J SALAUN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: Reading from a paper and choking back tears, Jean-Pierre Salaun said their grandfather may not have died for France under enemy bullets.
J SALAUN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "His field of honor was his home," he said, "where he tried to protect his children."
J SALAUN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "Grandpa, we came to tell you we are proud of you. You may not be a hero of France, but you are our hero."
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Brittany, France. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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