Finding the Heartbeat of Your Story | A Lesson From Normandy

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Soldiers who fight. They fight for the sake of others. They fight to protect others, and keeping our eyes on the others in stories like these is what men in my upcoming film Heroes of Carentan would have wanted. They fought for the French citizens under foreign occupation. They died for them. So that's how I've decided we're going to honor them. By telling the stories of the ones they went to save. Do you want to learn how to tell stories that touch and change the heart? Keep listening. I'm Christian Taylor a documentary filmmaker and a host of this podcast, Documentary First. Two years ago, at the annual D-Day commemorations in Normandy, I met a man named Yves Marchais. He was 86 then, 88 now, but in June of 1944, he was only six and a half years old, and he was living in Carentan, France. Under German occupation, I might add. He was only two when Germans rolled in there, so he grew up only knowing German occupation. This year, as I started to think about how I needed to bring Heroes of Carentan back to life, I wrote and asked if he might meet me in Carentan and tell me his story in person. He said yes. Then I started receiving letters, thirteen of them over the spring, and in those letters he made himself a rule.

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He said he'd be careful not to invent a memory, not to let something he'd read or seen since stand in for something he actually lived. He called what he could give me his hummingbird's share. Not the whole war. Just a little piece of it that passed in front of one boy's eyes. His letters were not only discovery for me, but they were actually discovery for him too. He said that he never really discussed it much with his family, never talked through it with them at all. But he said it never left his thoughts. The only reason he went back to Carentan at all two years ago was because of his son Arnaud, Arnaud watched Band of Brothers and realized his own father was a veteran at the Battle of Carentan, and he urged him to go back and understand the history that he had been part of. As Yves's memories unfolded to me, letter by letter, my heart was more and more moved for compassion for this boy and his family and all they had endured. I could not wait to see what would arrive. In the next letter, he wrote me about what the occupation was like. He told me one time a whole troop of Germans came up the rue du Château in front of his house, singing at the top of their lungs. Yves was really afraid and he didn't want them to see him, so he stood behind the curtain in his house and he lifted up the edge of it just enough to watch them pass.

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Can't you just see it? And he remembers being hungry. The bread was rationed out, and so his mother would lay slices of bread out on the mantelpiece, two per day. For the big brothers, one and a half for him, and one each for the little siblings. They had to decide when they wanted to eat it over the course of the day. That's all they got. And he remembers his father pulling all the kids around the kitchen table one day during the bombings and telling them, You're not to go outside. The Germans burn children. Yves didn't understand how they could do that. But after that, he certainly knew who the bad soldiers were. His father was in the middle of everything. One evening before any of the fighting started, he sat Yves on the crossbar of his bike, and he peddled him down to the port. There was some kind of training going on, he didn't really understand it, but from across the water, he watched the men open what looked to him like a box of fire and throwing flames over the water in bursts. Now, he didn't have a word for this. We know it now. It was a flamethrower, and they were practicing civil defense. And then the landings happened on June 6th, and the bombings began to find their street.

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The shells hit close as the Americans were trying to drive the Germans out of Carentan, and the sound slammed off the walls of his house. The walls themselves were shaking like thunder. Yves folded himself under the kitchen sink, his brothers under the table, and at every blow the door besides him jumps like something outside is throwing itself against it. And on the other side of that door is his little brother Joël, alone in the next room, crouched watching Yves through the gap, waiting to run. You can imagine Yves is panicked and tells him to stay, stay, just stay there. But he can't. He runs straight across the shaking room into the middle of All of them because of course it's better to die together, Yves said. It's less frightening than being alone. He talked about being in the basement in the cellar of his house. His father had built up brick walls down there, sort of like a maze, to hold the house up if it started to come down around their heads. They waited in the dark by the coal when it was bad, and Yves remembered watching his mother grab the bottle of cider and drink straight from the neck. Which she never did because she was very proper, and she said, One more that the Krauts won't have.

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It was a difficult day. The next day his father led them out of the house. He had no idea where they were going. Of course they were walking with whatever they could carry, and they went out through the empty hall at the bank with the strollers and the bicycle and the bundles, and they went down the rue Torteron. He remembers seeing no one. Not a German, not an American, nobody, just rubble and dust and the smell of it. He walks down the middle of the street, six years old, looking everywhere, thinking, how strange it is, but this whole town through all that bombing is deserted. Now, Denis van den Brink, my co-producer and an incredible historian, told me why the streets were empty. The Germans had been bombed to hell and were pulling back, but the Americans hadn't yet arrived. So for a few hours, Carentan really belonged to nobody. There was a gap, and somehow Yves's father knew to walk his whole family right through the middle of it. Hm. How did he know that? His father made his living on a bicycle, riding out to every farm in the countryside. He knew those roads and everybody on them. But how he picked that one period of time to move five kids and A grandmother and a wife through a war zone.

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I can't tell you. Yves can't tell you either. His father never said a word about it his whole life. So we'll just have to wonder. We'll never know. They walk a long way and they get to a farm, I know it now as the Leledy Farm at Saint-Hilaire-Petitville. His father knew the farmers, of course, so they were welcome. Yves was worn out from all the walking, and they tell him to go lie down in the front room underneath the window on a blanket, but He wasn't asleep for long because they woke him up and they pulled him outside and they told him to go to a shelter that was dug down into the ground underneath a huge wood pile. It had a staircase that was dug into the dirt and a tarp hanging down to close it off that was beside him. Other people were already in there. They were sitting in the dark, nobody was talking. And then suddenly, with no warning, the tarp lifts up, and a German soldier is looking down at them. And he starts talking in German gibberish, saying something very fast. And the only word that everyone could catch was Kaputt! Kaputt! Nobody was moving. And then he runs off. And nobody knew who is Kaputt. Them? The Germans? Everyone? They were all petrified. A while later, the tarp lifts again, and this time, it's a Frenchman and an American soldier.

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And He tells them they can come out and they're free. And they were free. They didn't really know it yet or know who to thank. But they would very soon. These are the stories Yves was writing to me in March and April of this year. And with each week, with each letter, I couldn't wait to get to Normandy to see where it all happened, to walk in his footsteps and to see the Heroes of Carentan through his eyes. And somewhere along the way, it hit me. I had found the heartbeat I've been looking for The soul my film was missing. While I was going through the archive material I had gotten from the 101st Airborne Division, I found something that helped me come to that conclusion. I came across a memoir written by Pfc. John E. Fitzgerald. He was of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, and this document was called The Colonel and the Runner. Fitzgerald was the runner for one of the most famous soldiers of the war, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole. Cole was the first paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division to receive the Medal of Honor for leading a bayonet charge at the Battle of Carentan. Three months later in Holland, his men were pinned down during Market Garden and their own planes were strafing overhead.

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Cole was afraid the planes would hit his own men, so he went out by himself in an open field to lay down orange panels to mark where they were. And just before he went, he sent his runner Fitzgerald off to get a Jeep full of ammunition. Well, Fitzgerald was gone only for a few minutes, but when he came back, Cole was dead, on the ground, shot by a sniper. Fitzgerald wrote something at the very beginning of his memoir that stuck with me. It is my belief that the data of history should not lose its heartbeat in becoming information. If too much time passes, we will be left only with the record. And lose the essence. That was the key that unlocked my stuck brain, my stuck film. The film, the way that I had been shaping it, was mostly just the record, the X's and the O's of the battle. But once I started reading Yves's letters, once I saw the passion and the joy and the pain in his eyes as he told his stories to me in Normandy, and I felt the love and the gratitude in his embrace. When he told me that sharing his story and going back to those places had closed a circle for him, there was no question.

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I had found the heartbeat that the data of the Heroes of Carentan has to have for anyone to care about it at all, for anyone to learn anything from it. As much as I want to tell you the rest of the stories he've told me, I have to stop and save them for next time. But what I do want to tell you is to remember this: As filmmakers, data, facts, and figures don't move people. They don't change a heart. If you want your film to touch people and to change them, first - you have to make them feel and you have to make them care. You have to find the heartbeat. Not the record of who took which bridge on what day. The boy. Yves - Yves is that boy. He's the heartbeat. of Carentan Go find your heartbeat, the heartbeat of your own story. If someone came to mind while you were listening, someone who needs to hear this, stop and text them the link to this episode right now. They'll thank you for it, and it's a great way to support us too. Thank you so much for listening to Documentary First, for we believe everybody has a story to tell, and you can be the one to tell it. Bye everybody.