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Few places in the world carry the weight that settles over Colleville-sur-Mer. Perched on the limestone cliffs above the Calvados coast in Lower Normandy, this small commune looks out over the English Channel with a quietness that belies the enormity of what happened on the beaches below on 6 June 1944. The American sector of the D-Day landings, codenamed Omaha Beach, stretches along the shore here, and the landscape has been shaped ever since by the gravity of that single morning.

The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial stands on a bluff above Omaha Beach and remains one of the most visited sites in France outside Paris. More than nine thousand white marble crosses and Stars of David are arranged across 70 acres of immaculate grounds maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. The geometry of the graves, the silence of the place, and the view down to the grey-green water below combine to produce something that resists easy description. Visitors arrive from across the world, many tracing family connections to the soldiers buried here, others simply bearing witness.