This could have been just a splendid sunset, shot on a Normandy coast during our holiday this year. But since it was Normandy, and the following week the region will be celebrating the 80th anniversary of the most iconic moment of the 20th century, one cannot stop putting everything we see and feel into perspective to the D-Day landings. As I look into the crimson setting sun, I remember the date, the 30th of May 2024. Eighty years ago, the sun had gone down perhaps the same way, except that there weren’t people to cherish the little luxuries like sunsets under the occupation. Eighty years ago, did the inhabitants of this picturesque peninsula imagine that their lives would be changed dramatically in less than a week? Did they think that life under occupation, which seemed to have become a perpetuity, would soon end, and liberty was at the doorsteps, although with a heavy price to be paid? As the sun went down, I looked in the direction where the sun was going down lay Utah Beach, and the sun might have set the same way six days later, in 1944, the last day the inhabitants of Basse-Normandie went to sleep in despair. The following morning would bring them hope for freedom, and Utah Beach would become one of the landing beaches with the least casualties. As I look into the horizon through the little gap between Utah Beach and the setting sun, I remember beyond Utah lay the Cotentin peninsula and the coastline extending to the northwest towards Cherbourg, which would become, along with Caen, one of the major cities to be freed from the German control. Looking at the coastline on the right, something won’t look right, as if a small piece of land jutted out of the sea somewhere in front of the coastline. Yes, it is indeed the Îles-de St. Marcouf, where before daybreak, four allied soldiers would swim carrying only knives, and the isles were the first piece of French land to be liberated before the assaults started at the beach. Then I think about the place from where I’m looking at this poignant sunset. I’m at Grandcamp-Maisy, a little fishing town that used to be known as Grandcamp-les-Bains during WWII. A few hundred metres inland on my left lay the Maisy battery, one of the formidable German defence posts famously boasted as an Atlantic wall by the Reich. A few miles behind me towards the northeast was Pointe-du-hoc, where allied soldiers would brave the choppy waters and climb rocky cliffs to take down German artillery overlooking Omaha beach further north. Yes, then there was bloody Omaha, but that was somewhere your imagination takes over from the lenses of the camera. As the sun nearly took a dip beyond the Cotentin peninsula, my mind, for one last time, harks back 80 years ago as if it was the sunset of the 5th of June 1944. The next day would be chaotic, bloody, catastrophic at places like Omaha, and the idyllic landscape would soon become a vast pile of rubbles, as the inhabitants of St. Lô would find out their beautiful medieval city became the capital of ruins. Yet that was the first step to freedom, and no matter how much we try to imagine how it felt to be free — numbed by the losses, yet relieved that the misery might end soon — we cannot know how it felt unless we lived under autocratic occupation. And while the dawn of the 6th of June marked a new era for Europe, and there will be stories of the bravery and losses alike, from the allied soldiers to the Résistance, the French saboteurs, one cannot help pausing for a moment, for the lives of the German soldiers lost during the battle of Normandy, living on paltry rations in a foreign land, believing in the glorious cause of a utopian Deutsches Vaterland, albeit ruled by a bunch of evil deranged maniacs.

Eighty years ago, Europe paid its price to earn its freedom from the evils of the Nazi empire, and D-Day landings were one of the momentous events that would pave the path for this freedom. For this reason, we can never forget the Landings when we think about Normandy; above all its beautiful beaches, quaint towns and villages, Norman heritage, and picturesque verdant landscapes, Normandy will remain the strip of land where the march towards Europe’s liberation began 80 years ago. This is why this was never going to be just another video of a sunset on a beach. Sunset merely provided the background, and the backdrop to the sunset that we can and can’t see is where the stories unfolded — of over 150,000 allied troops and over a million inhabitants of lower Normandy who would perish in the fierce battle for freedom or lived to recount their stories for the rest of their lives.