As I mentioned in my last week’s blog, I watched two really meaningful programs the week before Veterans Day. The first was about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II. The second, My Dad’s Secret War, is also about World War II.

In the thirties, a couple from a village in the northeastern part of France, both of them academics, took their two young sons and immigrated to the US where the husband became the dean of the French department at Smith College while his wife served as a professor. The language spoken in their home was French. Years later, when World War II began, their sons were old enough to enlist in the US Army where native French speakers were in short supply. Both sons were recruited to working in intelligence. The younger one in particular, a trained paratrooper who was both a talented radio operator and adept at working with codes, was soon transferred to work for the SOE, Britain’s Special Operations Executive, where he was trained to work as a secret agent. What he did in the war didn’t come to light until year later when his own five-year-old son opened a family bread box loaded with passports and IDs with his father’s photo but several different names as well as a number of weapons.

At the time he joined the SOE, the Resistance in France was a rag-tag group with no real organization or direction. The younger son, age 22, along with three other agents, including a female courier, were dubbed “the Salesmen” and air-dropped into Southern France, charged with the job of organizing the Resistance into a unified fighting force that could help disrupt the movement of German troops and slow them down as they traveled from that area of France north to help counter the D-Day invasion. Although the female courier was captured and ultimately executed by the Germans, the Salesmen succeeded in slowing the German army’s march north by more than a week.

Along the way north, German SS troops were ordered to punish Resistance activities in the area, including a horrific attack on the small French village of Ourador sur Glane. Men and boys were herded into a field and shot. Women and children were forced into the village church which was then set on fire. More than six hundred people died that day, and that’s when the story on PBS became personal for me as a layer of goosebumps flashed down my legs.

In the summer of 1997, Bill and I took off on our first Rick Steves, Europe Through the Back Door, adventure. We chose two, back-to-back, two-week tours of France, starting and ending in Paris. Along the way we saw all the usual sites—the Jeu de Paume, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower. We also got to see the Bayeux Tapestry and the incredible cave paintings of Southern France. By the way, about that tapestry? I had heard of it, of course, but I always imagined it as an immense floor-to-ceiling wall hanging. It’s immense, all right, 231 feet long, but it’s only 20 inches high, and it illustrates the exploits of William the Conqueror, one event after another, all of it embroidered by womenfolk of the people William actually … well … conquered. Seeing it in person was a huge surprise.

But from the whole trip, there are three things that really stuck me. Early on, we visited the site of the D-Day invasion. I had heard of the “beaches of Normandy,” but as a kid from Arizona, I always imagined something on a par with the ocean beaches in San Diego, which is to say, stretches of flat sand. Until we were having our Rick Steves picnic lunch on one of the bluffs overlooking the “beaches,” I had no idea about the reality of the landscape. After lunch we went downstairs in the museum and watched a film about the actual invasion. As soon as the lights dimmed in the room, and the credits began, an older gentleman seated behind us in the small theater began to sob, and he wept all the way through the movie. I have no idea which side he was on, but I know for sure he was there!

Then we visited the cemetery. As we re-boarded the bus after that solemn event, one of our fellow travelers, a woman from San Francisco, turned to the driver and asked, “Are we going to visit the German cemetery now?” I remember thinking, which side were you on? The next night at dinner, that question was answered when we shared table with her. Turns out her father had immigrated to the US in the twenties where he went to work as a printer for a German language newspaper in Milwaukee. He married a US citizen and together they had two daughters.

When World War II started, he was gathered up as a possible German collaborator. He spent a long period of time in jail in Wisconsin where he developed TB. By the time he was due to be transferred to an internment camp in Texas, his health was terribly impaired, and healthcare at the camp was non-existent. When the wife begged to be allowed to accompany him, she was told, “Of course, as long as you give up your US citizenship.” She and her daughters did so and moved to the camp. Sometime later, during a prisoner of war exchange, the family was loaded onto a Swedish ship to be sent back to Germany. The father passed away while crossing the Atlantic, and the mother and daughters, who had never before set foot in Germany, spent years stranded in war-torn Europe as displaced persons. After hearing her story, I was appalled that I had ever wondered which side she had been on—and, as it turns out, we did make a stop at the German cemetery as well.

Then we went to Southern France where we visited Ourador-sur-Glane. On the way there, we heard the story about the German massacre of 600 people that day in 1944. In 1969 General De Gaulle decreed that Ourador should remain as it was and as it still is. There are four entrances to the village, and each one contains a sign featuring the same word written in several different languages: Remember. It was a warm summer day as we walked through the shattered remains of the village in the same kind of quiet as you would find in an empty church. But somewhere in town that day was a child, most likely an overly tired toddler, wailing at the top of his lungs while we looked at bikes that still stood next to burned out buildings, cars moldering away where they’d been parked, a crumpled pedal sewing machine still standing inside the house that had been burned down around it.

Those haunting items were still there in their same spots in the filmed version of “My Dad’s Secret War.” At the time, we were told by the guides that there were no active members of the Resistance in Ourador at the time of the massacre which may or may not be true. Toward the end of the film, the former spy’s son said that late in his father’s life, the two of them were driving through France and found themselves only a few miles away from Ourador. The son asked if his father would like to go there. “No,” he said. “I want you to make a U-turn. I was the first one there that day. I don’t need to see it again.”

I don’t blame him, but I’ll be thinking about him on every D-Day and Veterans Day from here on out. By organizing the French Resistance and delaying those German troop movements, the so-called “Salesmen” spared countless Allied lives, and I’ll be thinking of them from now on as the “Heroes of D-Day who weren’t even there.”