Okay, I know the headline is scary, but the story is actually fascinating, and in an odd way hopeful. Really excellent article from the AP on these small caves in which 1/3 of the city of Caen hid out, for weeks, during the allied assault on Normandy. Many of the caves were just rediscovered, 100% in tact, just a they were left 60 years ago. Creepy.
The memories are 64 years old but retold with the clarity of yesterday: a young boy lowered by rope into a deep dark cave, watching the sky above shrink to a small and distant patch of blue.
That hole was home for a month for Gerard Mangnan, his family and dozens of others. And it likely saved their lives. While they huddled underground, Allied and Nazi troops above were waging one of the toughest battles of the D-Day invasion.
Now, generations later, the story of how caves and quarries became bomb shelters during the 1944 battle for the Normandy city of Caen is being brought alive by an amateur archaeologist, his photographer colleague, and the memories of survivors like Mangnan.
Most remarkably, the cave enthusiasts — Laurent Dujardin and Damien Butaeye — have rediscovered quarries that had lain largely undisturbed since the war, mysterious and eerie worlds frozen in time.
A shoe. A rusty bike. A child's coloring book. Jewelry. Cough mixture bottles. A box of Ridgways Finest Darjeeling Tea ("Grown at the altitude of 3,000 feet," says the still visible lettering)....
Butaeye and Dujardin guided AP journalists through one cave where several hundred people sheltered. It sent shivers down the spine, and not just because of the cold and damp. In a site so well preserved it was easy to imagine the hacking coughs of people packed together, children wailing, and old men groaning, the stink and discomfort, everyone wondering whether the relentless Allied bombing would bring down the caverns and bury them alive....
Roughly one-third of Caen's 60,000 inhabitants took refuge in about a dozen quarries, the biggest sheltering 8,000-10,000 people, said Simonnet. Some stayed a few days, others longer. Some emerged at day and sheltered at night. Mangnan, then 7, stayed underground for weeks without coming up.
The cave that the AP toured burrowed dozens of yards into a hill and its entrance, behind a house, was barely shoulder-wide — a narrow slippery crack in the rock that led down to larger caverns.
There, refugees slept on mattresses, straw or piles of wood shavings. Families marked out their space by piling stones into little walls. They are still visible....
His elder brother Roger, then 18, was killed falling down the hole on June 23, 1944, he said. Venturing outside, the brother had stolen some machine gun ammunition from the Germans. They chased him back, shooting. He leaped for the rope, but let go as he slid down.
"Shots were crackling around the hole," said Mangnan. "He fell at my feet, behind me."
Here lay a rusty fork and spoon, there, an ink bottle still screwed shut with ink inside.
