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At the National World War II Memorial, historian Alex Kershaw has found an unlikely way to keep D-Day alive: live social media posts timed to the events of June 6, 1944.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
Eighty-two years ago today, an Allied army came ashore in Normandy to liberate Western Europe from Nazi Germany. NPR's Henry Larson met a man determined to keep memories of the D-Day invasion alive as vivid as if it were happening today.
HENRY LARSON, BYLINE: A trip to the World War II Memorial in the hours before the anniversary of Operation Overlord will find you plenty of tourists.
PAUL GOODE: We took a family vacation. My wife's trying to kill me with all the walking and stuff.
LARSON: Paul Goode (ph) was visiting from Mississippi, but he wasn't aware of the anniversary.
GOODE: Honestly, until you just said it, I didn't think about D-Day 'cause I had a grandfather that went on the beach at Normandy a few days after D-Day that he used to talk about. He's passed since then.
LARSON: Goode wasn't alone. Lots of folks weren't clocking the commemoration of the day more than 100,000 soldiers stormed the beaches and countryside of occupied France. But off to the side of the memorial, away from the fountains and the towering columns, I met up with someone who could tell the story of the people who fought that day like it had just happened.
ALEX KERSHAW: Right now, on D-Day, he's lying on a bunch of rocks on Omaha Beach in Dog Green Sector, and he's in extraordinary emotional trauma.
LARSON: Alex Kershaw is the resident historian for Friends of the National World War II Memorial. And he was born well after 1944. He's been writing and speaking about World War II for decades. It's personal.
KERSHAW: But both my grandfathers did fight in World War II, and my mother's father died of complications from his wounds in 1944 when she was less than a year old. I grew up kind of in the shadow of my mother's grief. So yeah, that did profoundly affect me.
LARSON: Kershaw's whole job is making the monument next to us come to life, making some meaning of the water and the stone. And he's been profoundly moved by the soldiers who served on D-Day.
KERSHAW: For what today did they sacrifice their lives? And I'd say for my life, for any 60-year-old in Europe and in the U.S., my life is what they sacrificed their life for.
LARSON: For the last couple years, he's tried to tell their stories in a pretty unique way on social media.
KERSHAW: And I live tweet, so I tweet as if I'm actually reporting on it in real time. I will tweet an image of the first C-47 leaving England at 9:50 p.m. English Time.
LARSON: He posts countless times over the course of the 48 hours of the invasion, timing them to publish at the exact minute paratrooper drops and beach landings happened decades ago.
KERSHAW: I'm trying to put people right there at the exact time when things happened and trying to make them feel the uncertainty, the courage, the intensity, the tragedy.
LARSON: The thing is, people love his posts. Millions have viewed them this year.
KERSHAW: Yesterday evening, I had 25,000 extra followers in about 3 hours. So obviously, something's hitting a nerve here.
LARSON: Kershaw's comments have been flooded with people responding to his live retelling.
KERSHAW: The most moving is when you have people post pictures of their dads. You know, they post a picture and say, my dad died on Omaha Beach - my grandfather, my uncle.
LARSON: It's a much different kind of memorial than a stone structure. But Kershaw says he wants people to remember real moments in time.
KERSHAW: In a moment on Twitter, you are living life. That's all you have. And so what you feel in that moment, what you remember, what you understand, is really what life boils down to.
LARSON: Compared to all the plaques and the fountains just a few feet away, the posts are ephemeral. They're scrollable. But they also feel a little closer, more of this moment and bizarrely, occasionally, a little more real.
Henry Larson, with producer Zephyr Weinreich, on the National Mall in Washington.
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