As the 78th anniversary of June 6, 1944 approaches, relatives and descendants of Anglo-Saxon veterans demanded on Friday the abandonment of a controversial project for an immersive park on the French coast on the history of the Landings.
“We, children, grandchildren and relatives of American, British and Canadian fighters who took part in the D-Day battles (…) want to reiterate firmly our opposition to the park project Tribute to heroes “Write these descendants in a press release signed by a hundred people. “We refuse that the memory of our dead be used today to” retain a day or two more “tourists, as desired by Mr. (Hervé) Morin, president of the Region” Normandy, add the signatories, including members of veterans associations.
About the project, financed by private funds and sometimes called “D-Day land” by its opponents, this collective of signatories believes in particular that “the transmission of memory is here only a pretext for the development of a business far removed from the dramas still very present in our personal and family histories”. “Accepting this project would be a sign that the value and pain of sacrifices have been forgotten, that our dead, reduced to the role of extras in a show, are worth no more than an entrance ticket to a thrilling park” , they point out.
“The transmission of memory […] can in no case be done in a spectacular, festive and commercial mode” according to the descendants of the Kieffer commando
According to them, there is “still time to realize this” because “implementing this alleged Tribute to heroes would definitely do us an insult”. Contacted by AFP, Régis Lefèbvre, one of the promoters of the project whose details have not yet been revealed, did not wish to speak. In October 2020 he had already denied considering the creation of an amusement park. “It’s a 50-minute living documentary that will mix archival footage, immersive techniques and tableaux vivants” with extras on a theater on rails, all “to tell real facts without fiction”, he told the newspaper. AFP.
In a column published in Le Monde in September 2020, the descendants of the Kieffer commando – the only French commando in uniform to have taken part in the Landings – had already considered that the “transmission of memory […] can in no way be done in a spectacular, festive and commercial way”.