Martine & Michel
SCHUBNEL
Colleville-Montgomery
Michel and Martine Schubnel, a family with crossed destinies
My name is Michel Schubnel and I come from Alsace. I was born on 4 June 1950, almost on 6 June!
My name is Martine Schubnel and I'm a lifelong Colleville resident. I was born on 11 December 1951, after the war.
We met on a trip that my parents, and my father in particular, wanted to take, to revisit everything he'd done and meet the people he'd known. And that was in 1968, so it was a while ago. And then a few years later, we got married. Martine was 16 and a half and I had just turned 18.
Martine's parents were honoured by the British for hiding a British airman during the D-Day landings
This is a family home. My grandparents lived here during the war. And during the war, my grandparents housed Austrian officers.
In fact, these soldiers were on the Hillman site to the south of the town. It was a German command centre, covering the entire coast from Merville to Courseulles. And the headquarters were up there.
There were two non-commissioned officers. They would come here in the evening, sleep here and then leave in the morning.
D-Day: As it had been bombed, there was the remains of a bomb behind the house. It was called the Morris site. There were casemates, the gun, and they fired on the boats and on the beach.
And they were bombed. And then there was a bomb, well the remains of a bomb because it had already exploded, which fell on the roof, which went right through the roof, through the first floor. Incidentally, I've always left the hole, I've never closed it!
Here, it was the First Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment that liberated the town. The Kieffer commandos landed at Colleville, but their mission was to liberate Ouistreham.
But here, it was the Suffolks, the First Suffolk Battalion, who liberated the commune and then took over the site during the day.
But by 11.00am, it was all over. They had gone behind the casemates. There were Poles inside, troops from the East who had also been drafted. They didn't want to be killed for Hitler!
I'm a member of the Friends of the Suffolk Regiment. Now, unfortunately, there are no veterans.
And so we have our site up there, which is huge, with around thirty underground blockhouses that we've cleared.
A family from Colleville donated a blockhouse that was on their land, and it was the wish of the woman's father-in-law, who was mayor of Colleville on 6 June 1944.
He always wanted one of the remains to go back to the British regiment that liberated our town.
8.V.45: Back home safe and sound
And pretty soon there was a handful of people from Colleville... at least 200 of them turned up for the inauguration. So we set up this association to maintain the bonds of friendship with the veterans and also as a duty of remembrance.
Our association has grown, and little by little we've cleared out other blockhouses and refitted them. I've been doing this for 34 years!
We have to remember what happened.
We get a lot of requests from secondary schools. A lot of soldiers are coming too. British soldiers.
It's no fun. When the kids come, they like to play up there with machine guns. But they still understand very well, even though they are 10 years old, what has happened and that it can happen again. And that war is real.
It's good that here in schools, especially in Normandy, we're talking about it quite a lot. That's a good thing.
We often have our grandchildren with us, one of whom is 10 years old. We explain it to him so that it doesn't happen again and so that he knows the story.
We also have grown-up grandchildren and I often say: ‘I hope they don't go to war’.
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