PARIS (AP) — When he left Paris at age 18, the plan was
to go to New York for a year and learn his father’s sewing machine
trade. Six years later, Bernard Dargols found himself crossing the
Channel in a U.S. Army uniform, sloshing ashore on Omaha Beach to a
homeland that had persecuted his Jewish family.
Dargols’ journey
from Paris to New York and back ended when he drove his Army jeep into a
courtyard in the recently liberated French capital, striding upstairs
into a darkened apartment and into the arms of his weeping mother. Until
that moment, he hadn’t known whether she had survived the Nazi
occupation.
"She hadn’t seen me in six years and I saw she was
alive," Dargols said in an interview ahead of the 70th anniversary of
the D-Day invasion that helped defeat the Nazis.
Once back, he
learned about the cousins who had been taken away to concentration
camps, and about his grandfather, who had managed to escape the French
transit camp at Drancy. He learned his father’s sewing machine shop had
been seized. He saw a city empty of non-military traffic, because there
was no more gasoline.
"I had such a hatred of the German army," he said.
Emotion
overcomes him even now, at age 94, when he thinks back to the
increasingly desperate letters from his family, describing Gestapo
sweeps and the racial laws that robbed his father of his shop. His
father and brothers had fled. Their mother stayed behind to care for
both sets of grandparents, too frail to escape.
Today Dargols avoids the company of Germans his own age.
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Dargols
does not get seasick. He has an uncanny recall of topography, numbers
and names. He has an ironic sense of humor and is multilingual, thanks
to his English-born mother and Yiddish from his father’s family. All of
these qualities would serve the Allies well.
In New York, after
France’s Vichy government sided with the Germans, the French consultate
in New York sent Dargols a draft summons. He ignored it.
Dargols was determined to fight — but certainly not with the Nazis.
He
considered joining the resistance Free French forces, but had heard
that leader Charles de Gaulle didn’t get along with the Americans and
British. He considered the British but they only wanted sailors, and he
wasn’t interested. Then his friends said they were sure the United
States would soon jump into the war — so he got American citizenship and
signed up for the U.S. Army.
The call-up came soon, shortly after
the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Dargols found himself in Camp Croft
basic training in South Carolina, with a blank map of France in front of
him on a desk.
"A neutral map, as they say, just the cities
marked 1234 and the rivers marked ABCD," Dargols recounts. His
successful test placing names to places got him sent to military
intelligence training, where he briefly taught French to other GIs and
learned to distinguish the sounds of different German aircraft. He
feared he’d end up as an interpreter, writing and translating papers.
"That
was exactly what I didn’t want. I wanted to fight," he said. Wry and
still combative seven decades later, he added: "If I look at myself in
the mirror, I can’t understand how I was so willing to fight. But I
think if I was 24 again, I would fight again."
He was sent to England, where he was under orders to say nothing about his work for the military.
His
father and two younger brothers had managed to escape France on an
18-month journey that took them through Cuba, and eventually to New
York. They moved into Dargols’ apartment just as he was leaving for
basic training. Once he started intelligence work, his communications
with them were cryptic by necessity.
"Do not worry if my address
changes yet again, it means nothing," he wrote his father from England
on May 22, 1944. "I have every reason, without being able to explain, to
be happy."
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And so on June 5, 1944, Dargols found
himself in a boat as a staff sergeant for the U.S. Army, part of a small
intelligence unit that also included Hans Namuth, a German-born
photographer who defied his father by turning against the Nazis and
emigrating to the United States. They landed in Normandy on June 8 —
D-Day Plus 2.
His colonel’s orders were to head into the village
of Formigny and learn about the German forces in the area: "You know
what questions to ask … If you’re not here after two hours, we forget
about you." After that successful mission, the ritual repeated itself
regularly — with the same two-hour rule.
The locals didn’t know
what to make of Dargols’ Army jeep, with "La Bastille" proudly painted
on the side in honor of its Gallic sergeant.
"Within a few minutes
… I was surrounded by old men who wanted to kiss me as a liberator.
It was very moving," he said. He had no problem persuading people to
share what they knew about the German forces nearby, and made it back to
base in time, every time.
The road he took from Omaha Beach has borne his name since 2008.
Dargols
made it to Paris in September, and that fall he transferred to the U.S.
Counterintelligence Corps. During that time, his younger brother Simon
landed with American forces in Marseille, returning to the same port
city he had escaped from three years before.
Simon’s unit ended up
outside Landsberg, Germany, stumbling upon part of the Dachau
concentration camp, where prisoners embraced him when they learned he
spoke Yiddish and was there to free them.
Namuth, the German who
traveled across the Channel with Bernard Dargols, returned to the United
States after his service and turned his military experience as a
photographer into a career taking portraits and making films, famously
documenting Jackson Pollack splattering paint.
Bernard Dargols
returned to New York, and married his French fiancee. The couple
eventually returned and settled in the land of their birth. His father
also returned to France — where he was reunited with his wife and
reopened his shop.
Dargols killed no Germans during his time in the Army; his job was to gather information.
"I
wanted to kill so many Germans. I was not given the chance to kill
one," he said. Today, in his twilight years, he does not regret that,
but neither does he forget what happened to his country — and his
family.
"I don’t wish youngsters to be faced with the same tragedy as I was faced, and not (be) prepared to
be a soldier."
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Jeffrey Schaeffer in Paris contributed to this report.