The National D-Day Memorial Foundation Internship— 71st Anniversary of D-Day: 6 June 1944

WOW. That word pretty much encapsulates how amazing the day was on Saturday. Jack and I woke up bright and early to head down to Bedford to volunteer at the Memorial during the 71st anniversary celebration. I was really looking forward to it and so was he, and we were NOT disappointed.

A shot of the Memorial before the ceremony, June 6 2015

When we arrived, there were not too many people on site, so we parked at the bottom of the hill and walked up to the tent where we met the rest of the Education interns/staff. We were closing the tent 15 minutes before the ceremony so we were just waiting for that time to close up shop. While the others were taking advantage of the A/C in the tent, Jack and I made a lap around site. We went up to the top to look at what the set-up was and so I could show him my favorite statue with the ring on the finger 🙂 Then, as we came down we saw some WWII re-enactors and went to talk to them and look at their stuff.

The site before there were too many people.

Selfie with the Overlord Arch.

WWII reenacting stuff. This stuff was from a company representing the 29th infantry. You can tell by the white and blue yin yang on their equipment.

The British camp re-enactment.

On our way back to the tent, we got voluntold to help take the wreaths all the way from the gift shop, across the memorial and put them next to the airplane. They smelled wonderful and looked beautiful, but were VERY heavy! The wreaths commemorated some specific battalions, companies, etc. Jack and Connor even almost got to lay the Canadian wreath because the Canadian attaches did not show up, but Felicia enlisted the British reenactors to do it instead, thankfully!

A close up of the gorgeous wreaths.

A shot of the whole line of wreaths!

When we got back to the tent, the headlining speaker was there. She was quiet and cute all decked out in red, white, and blue. When someone came in and asked her if she was from Belgium (more on that a little later), she said, “No! I am an American citizen” as proudly as anyone I’ve ever heard. That feistiness showed through in her speech that happened a little later on.

Anywho, we got to sit down and talk to a WWII and D-Day veteran named Buster who was an engineer that took in the first few loads of people from the ships stationed 10 miles out from Normandy all the way into the beaches and back out again several times. His first trip contained the 2nd Ranger Battalion (HOOAH!), and several trips after that contained some of the guys from the 29th Infantry (Central Virginia Boys, including the Bedford Boys). It was a cool experience to get to talk to him. After he finally decided that he did not want to wait for his son to come get him anymore and reassured us that he could still walk, we headed out to the ceremony.

The 29th Division band played music at the beginning, and then the Drum and Fife part of the 29th Division band played too. The colors were presented and the Star Spangled Banner played. The Chairman of the National D-Day Memorial Foundation did the welcome. Next, someone read Eisenhower’s Order of the Day from 6 June 1944 and someone else read Roosevelt’s D-Day Prayer.

Eisenhower’s Order of the Day:                                 “Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark on the Great Crusade towards which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you! The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world……………….”

Then Shenandoah was played and the wreaths were laid. During all of this we were on patrol for people falling because it was pretty hot that day. Luckily only one person fell and they were rescued immediately by the Rescue Squad. The Purple Heart plaque was on the wall behind where we were standing, so these guys with the purple heart wreath ended up standing next to us. We offered and got them some water and they were very happy about it even when I saw one of them a few hours later!

Taps was played by a bugler after the wreaths were laid. Then someone introduced our speaker (remember, the quiet lady we hung out with in the tent before the ceremony?) and she got up to speak. Dame Mary Sigillo Barraco is 91 years old, and she was 17 years old when the war broke out in Europe. Before the war, she lived in the United States with her mother and father until the depression when her father moved to Canada and she moved with her mother back to her mother’s homeland of Belgium. She was in Belgium when the war broke out.

After Germany invaded Belgium, Mary Sigillo as she was named then, joined the Belgian Resistance called the Belgian Freedom Fighters. She and her fiance were captured and taken to separate prison camps where he was executed and she was sentenced to 16 months. In that 16 months, Mary was beaten, broken, and sterilized. She spoke about the small 4′ by 4′ locker she was forced to stay in and how when she was finally let out, she could not stand up straight because she had not in so long. She told us how she had almost given up when one day she heard American bomber planes flying ahead and they gave her the strength to push forward because she knew she had not been given up on.

She made 9/11 parallel to that of what happened when she was in Belgium and it was invaded. She talked about freedom and the United States and how we cannot take anything we have for granted. I was moved to tears and to laughter and enjoyed her loud, powerful voice and message through the telling of her story.

These were some of my favorite quotes:

“I have lost my American freedoms once and by God I never want to lose them again!”

Talking about post 9/11 in the U.S.: “One thing has not changed: we still live in the greatest country in the world!

On her title as torchbearer of Freedom: “I wish to pass my torch of freedom to each and everyone of you with the hope and the prayer that you will take that torch of freedom and carry it proudly for the whole world to see.” 

It is only after we have lost our freedom we appreciate its value!

On Nazi Germany’s oppression: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away!”

She pushed so hard for us to not take our freedoms for granted because she had seen them all get taken away from her. There are no words to describe how amazing her speech was. She is truly a hero. After the war, she got married in 1949 and was widowed by Mr. Barraco in 1978. In 2004, she was knighted by the king of Belgium hence her name: Dame Mary Sigillo Barraco.

After that, the rest of the ceremony was kind of a blur. Some more people spoke and the band played. The Coast Guard Silent Drill team performed for the WWII veterans, which was really cool. Afterwards, Jack and I were stationed in the hospitality tent and I got to talk to some more of the veterans and bond with the other interns. We helped clean off tables and such, but mostly we just took in our surroundings.

When it was nearing the end of the day, we headed back into the tent. Some people with kids came in and out asking questions, and to my surprise I could help answer a lot of them. The best part about the end of the day was the moment I got to take a picture with the Dame, though. I told her she had made me cry and she apologized. I made sure to let her know that they were not sad tears and that she had just moved me, and she looked at me with a smile and appreciation in her eyes (as cheesy as that sounds). It was an absolute blessing to get to experience someone who had been through so much approach life with such a positive attitude.

Dame Mary Sigillo Barraco and myself.

A life-changing experience. 

The D-Day Memorial Foundation Internship: Week Three

Today I semi-finished up week three of my internship. I say semi because I’ll be heading back to Bedford on Saturday to commemorate the 71st Anniversary of D-Day itself. I think I’ll save that for a post of its own, though, so here’s the unofficial week three 🙂

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

We spent the first half of the day doing clean-up at the downtown office. They moved into their building in November, the week of Thanksgiving, and had accumulated collections, junk, etc., and it had all been piling up. We organized where stuff went, sending some back to the collection room, some to storage in the dungeon under the stairs, and some we just made look neater. I love organizing and it was a fun morning (I’m weird, I know). I think the fact we spent the morning cleaning up just solidifies the fact that the public history world is full of all sorts of jobs and at a small foundation like ours, a historian has to be willing to do a little bit of every kind of work involved.

We took a break for lunch and then I got to work on my lesson plan for Spy Camp. There are two camps at the Memorial this summer, the first is a middle schooler Spy camp, and then there is the World War II Day Camp. Each of the interns has to make a lesson for each camp. I worked on my lesson plan for Spy Camp on Tuesday. That lesson was just a general overview of WWII including: the Allied/Axis Powers, leadership, turning points in the war, etc. I talked about the causes of the war, the leadership in both the Allied and Axis powers, and several battles. All of the information was supposed to be based on SOL benchmarks, which is my first interaction on the teaching side of standardized testing. Luckily for me, I found a history SOL specialist’s website who helped me lay out exactly what the kids were supposed to know. I just followed along the benchmark outline and tried to keep it interesting for the kids with interactive questions. Also, since I won’t be there for the Spy Camp because of my Civil War Workshop class, I had to cue up the animations so that the questions and answers did not pop up at the same time and put “click” cues on the outline I had for whomever teaches it. I got my Spy Camp outline and presentation done complete with pictures all on Tuesday. It’s kind of a mile marker for me, because I haven’t been in any core education classes yet so that was my first outline. Hopefully it goes well. Fingers crossed.

Thursday, June 4, 2015

So, today I got to sit in on a presentation and do a tour for our last school group of the season because “schooooooooool’s out for summahhhhhh.” It was a group of about 35 middle schoolers and their chaperones. They were very responsive inside the education tent throughout the program. They gave good guesses on questions and were actively learning. When I took them out on site, I let them know that we had a lot of veterans around because the VA had brought a few mini buses full of them to visit the Memorial and that they needed to be respectful. The kids did an amazing job. I was so impressed. They were quiet and listening to me on site even though they were cold and miserable and wet because it would NOT stop misting today (I was thankful it wasn’t scorching hot for once). It was only my second tour and we had to do some improvising because there were so many tours out and about, but I think (and hope) that it went well. I got to show them my favorite statue on the museum and they were just as amazed by it as I was:

This statue has a wedding band melded into it. The story behind it is a phenomenal one. The owner of the wedding band was dying on the beach on D-Day and gave his band for his buddy to take home to his wife when the war was over. His buddy carried it all through the campaign to liberate Europe and when he got home, he and HIS wife tried to find the owner’s wife but couldn’t so they sent it to the Memorial. Although it is sad that the ring never found its way to the wife, I think the fact that the ring made it all the way from the beaches of Normandy back to the U.S. speaks to the bond that our servicemen and servicewomen have for each other.

The ring is on the standing guy’s ring finger on the hand closest to us.

After the tour, I waited with them in the gift shop until they were all through and then headed out for some lunch. We all met up downtown to discuss what was going on on Saturday, and let me just say, if anybody does NOT have plans for Saturday, Bedford, VA would be a cool place to be. There are going to be food vendors and music, as well as speakers from out of the country and veterans to WWII and D-Day. It will be a special day.

Anywho, after lunch I got to work on my second lesson plan, which is for the WWII Day Camp and is an interactive video lesson about the campaign for Europe from D-Day to Victory in Berlin. They gave me this AMAZING website to use (you should really check it out): ddaytovictory.ca. The website has super cool graphics and information about the six major battles that were fought between D-Day and the liberation in Berlin. Each battle scene has multiple weapons to learn about with veterans talking about whether or not they were effective and what their uses were. Each scene also has personal accounts of several veterans talking about their experiences during the battles and the war in general. My job was to choose one weapon and one personal story from each battle and create a fill-in-the-blank worksheet for the kids, which I did.

However, I also wanted to make sure the kids understood the valor, fidelity, and sacrifice of the men and women who told their personal accounts, so I made a powerpoint defining those terms and preluding the videos with questions such as: “were they or weren’t they afraid?,” if they were/were not afraid, why?,” and “who did they count on/fight for?” I’m hoping the kids keep in mind these questions as they watch the videos, and I included some fill-in-the-blanks related to these questions to emphasize the point. I highly suggest checking the website out yourselves, but I thought the coolest part was how the veterans said that they did not have time to be afraid because they had to do what they had to do and they had to do it because of their buddy next to them. Wordy, I know, but hopefully  you get the point. Our armed forces face obstacles and fear everyday, and they still fight for the cause because they have to for each other. This is the truth no matter the time period, and I think it is important that the kids come away with that understanding.

It touched my heart to hear these veterans talk about how much their battle buddies meant to them because every day that I am in Bedford all I can think about are the personal stories that each one of the soldiers we are commemorating has. It is a special thing to be in a place where those who made the ultimate sacrifice can be honored and those who appreciate their sacrifice can come to understand it farther.

Anyway, I probably sound like a broken record, but if you get the chance you should definitely make a visit to Bedford, VA to check out this special place. And if you’re free on Saturday, what better day to go visit the Memorial than a June 6th?

Event info: 71st Anniversary

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Public History: Essays from the Field, edited by James B. Gardner and Peter S. La Paglia

I read “Becoming a Public Historian” by Constance B. Schulz

Ms. Schulz talks about how to go about becoming a Public Historian. Since the field has always been defined as what it is NOT (an academic field), a lot of academic institutions did not have good programs in it, as I’ve talked about in other blog posts. She discusses how, at first, the only way someone could become a public historian was to actually go into the field and just do it. However, as interest sparked in public history, some professors added programs at their school the best that they could. Ever since public history was added to academia through a specific program, those who work in the field and have not gone to school go to workshops to help them catch up/keep learning about public history. Schulz emphasizes how important it is to have an interdisciplinary education when it comes to public history because it involves a little bit of everything.

I think that the reoccurring theme in this book and the field of public history seems to be the interdisciplinary aspects of it. It makes complete sense that it would need to be, as the field, especially in a small museum requires jacks of all trades, like I’ve talked about before. I think it is interesting how public historians emphasize how important it is to go to school for public history if you can. I would imagine and hope that those programs involve a lot of in the field training whether it be forced or highly recommended. I think that public history is something that will always continue evolving because of the technology that we are continually coming up with, etc. Therefore, I don’t think there can ever be a set curriculum for the program and I think that workshops like Ms. Schulz talked about will always be necessary. To me, though, that is an exciting concept because there are constant opportunities to grow and develop.

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Today I wrapped up 27 hours in the past three weeks. I can’t believe it’s only been three weeks though, I already feel welcome as part of the crew.  When you love what you’re doing, it’s not like a job, and although I’m not getting paid ( 😉 ) I never thought I’d be able to say that. Thankful for the opportunity more and more everyday.