D-Day – June 6, 1944    My brother’s hateful effort to destroying my father’s  pictures hurts especially on D Day.

Today is June 6, the anniversary of D-Day and now four days after the anniversary of my father’s death six years ago.

D day was always an important day for MY pride.  Robert Schwartz was never interested in celebrating his role in World War II  but, I still needed to call, to say thank you.  I never thanked just him, because I have been in awe of the amazing heroism of all the Americans who took part in that landing. In my onw time, with wars fought for less noble reasons and  fought by remote control and by shock and awe, my respect for the heroes of June 6 has continues to grow.

The pictures on this page document my father’s role in that landing.  Only one, the one showing the back of an American soldier, is not from the collection of my father’s work.  That first image, however, makes a point. The G.I., with his back to us, is entering a village.  I imagine there is a scholar at the US Holocaust Museum who can look at this image and tell us where the village is. Perhaps, this G.I. is my father or perhaps one of the surviving soldiers, who might be able to recognize Robert if we could make the his pictures available.   My brother’s hateful effort to destroying these pictures hurts especially today.

Normandy June 1944 A newly killed German hanging out in the back of a truck. He was killed while sniping, Note the other dead jerry by the side of the road.

Normandy, June 1944.  The interior of a Normandy farmhouse where I bartered for fresh eggs  …. one unique part of the collection is that we have many of the negatives.  These need to be preserved so we can enlarge them for scholars to learn more.

Robert never talked much about the war, his role on D day has always been somewhat of a conjecture.  What I know of the story begins with Robert’s training in the United States.  My dad signed up for two things. One was as the commanding officer of his own medical company, the company he later led into Buchenwald.  The other was for personal training in poison gas.  Among the materials confiscated by my brother Hugh Schwartz, there are extensive notes my father took in poison gas school as well as the materials given to him by the United States Army.  As a result of that training, my father was assigned to Dwight Eisenhower as a poison gas expert. The story Robert did tell was of sitting beside a swimming pool at a hotel in England.  My Dad asked Eisenhower if the company could be sent into Europe in order to fight the Nazis.  Eisenhower agreed. W hile we do not know whether Robert landed in the first wave or later, his pictures from Normandy show that he was there early on. The pictures also show and anger against the Nazis that persisted all of Robert’s life.

Normandy, June 1944, This Jerry will never again harm innocent people.

Normandy, June 1944, This Jerry will never again harm innocent people.