Now 80 years after the Allied landings in Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, many stories continue to bring this heroic and bloody day to life. The story of Arthur and Adrien Astier is one of them. Aged 8 and 6 in 1944, they had a front-row seat to the D-Day landings, hidden among the Congregation of Sisters of Notre-Dame de Fidélité, in Douvres (Calvados).
Children sent to safety in the countryside
March 1944: two little boys aged 8 and 6, wearing shorts and laced boots, leave their Parisian life for the Normandy coast. Their parents, Paul and Louise Astier, were both of Jewish origin, having converted to Catholicism in 1940. Faced with the risk of deportation, the Astiers decided to hide their offspring away from Paris.
Jacques, Bernard, and Etienne, the three eldest, had already been sent to Brittany in 1941. The two youngest, Arthur and Adrien, were sent to Dover on the advice of Dom Aubourg, a Benedictine monk at Solesmes Abbey and a close family friend
“It was a friend of Mum's, Marie-Louise, who transported us from the Saint-Lazare station to Caen,” Adrien, the youngest of the siblings, tells Aleteia. “We passed her off as our aunt during the journey. When we arrived in Caen, the Sisters picked us up and took us to Douvres.”
In the care of nuns
There, facing the English Channel and just a few yards from the beaches, is the Convent of Notre-Dame de Fidélité. The semi-cloistered nuns ran a boarding school for young girls and an orphanage. The congregation opened its doors to the two boys, nicknamed “big A” and “little A.”
“I remember the Mother Superior when we arrived. She was a very imposing woman, like those abbesses painted by Philippe de Champaigne.”
Apart from the Mother Superior, none of the nuns knew the children's origins or the reason for their impromptu arrival. None would ask any questions.
“The parcels arrived safely,” Dom Aubourg wrote to the children's mother to reassure her. “We had to be as discreet as possible, as everything was subject to surveillance, and as a precaution we weren’t mentioned by name,” Adrien tells Aleteia.
A novice, Sr. Saint Blandine, took special charge of the two new arrivals. “She was like a second mother. I often say that it was with us that she was able to satisfy her maternal instinct,” says Adrien Astier with undisguised tenderness. “We stayed in her care until we left.”
Taking in their little protégés was a risk for the nuns. Normandy had been under occupation for four years. The hardships of war were experienced with rare intensity: bombing, rationing ... Arthur and Adrien nevertheless managed to remain safe with their adoptive mothers, who tenderly protected them from the harsh reality of war.
As bombing intensified in May 1944, schools closed and children were sent home. The nuns' little boarders were no exception. Only the Astier brothers remained in Dover, where they attended classes at the pace of monastic life.
“We had no sense of fear or danger. Our parents always tried to preserve us from anxiety, and the sisters did the same.”
D-Day
That was the status until the night of June 5-6, 1944. Sirens tore through the night with their shrill wail, and the drone of bombers woke the community with a start. “And then the naval cannonade began,” recalls Adrien Astier. They had a sleepless night.
The result of long preparation, Operation Overlord was launched by Allied troops, marking the start of the Battle of Normandy, in which three million soldiers would take part. Deceived by Operation Fortitude, with which the Allies had succeeded in making a landing in the Pas-de-Calais appear imminent, the Germans were surprised by the arrival on the Normandy coast of a British, American, and Canadian contingent. Just before the bloody assault on the beaches, the Germans saw the Allied armada emerge on the waters of the English Channel: battleships and destroyers appeared like ghosts on the horizon.
More than 11,000 aircraft stormed the Normandy skies. Airborne divisions were dropped under fire, and on the ground, 50,000 men landed from barges on five beaches located from west to east of the coast: code named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. It was opposite the latter that the Astier children experienced “the longest day” at close quarters.
“We went up to the attic first, to look out over the sea. My brother still remembers it: It was covered with boats. Then, all of a sudden, the windows were blown out by shrapnel.”
Spared from destruction
Allied bombing raids swept away everything in their path: Caen, a martyred city, collapsed under a deluge of artillery for over 30 days. Douvres was not spared. Only Bayeux miraculously escaped the apocalypse, thanks to Dom Aubourg, who managed to warn the Allies in time that the Germans had evacuated the town.
At the Délivrande convent, a nun paced the corridors, bell in hand: It was time to go down to the cellar. The children and the congregation would remain hidden there until the end of July, after the Battle of Caen.
“The convent was hardly touched. However, I learned that in one of its meadows there was an important German radar station, which the Allies wanted to destroy. So we found a lot of shrapnel in the area, which my brother and I used to collect.”
After the war
Arthur and Adrien wouldn’t return to their family home until after the liberation of Paris in September 1944. “My parents came to get me by car. In the meantime, we'd had a little sister, Marie-Hélène, born on June 19. Thanks to the nuns, we'd learned to sew and made her a little bib,” smiles Adrien.
“It was heartbreaking to leave the congregation. They were real mothers to us,” he recalls. “We returned to a gradually normal life in Paris, but nobody talked about the war anymore. I lost an uncle and a distant cousin, both deported. But these were things you kept to yourself. My parents were lucky enough to keep their faith in God strong despite the ordeal, but I never understood how a good God could allow such horrors,” Adrien says with a sigh. “But the Sisters of La Délivrande will always remain sacred in my eyes, and extraordinarily dear to my heart.”
