While we have been in Europe, I’ve been trying to track down
locations featured in my Grandpa’s photos. I do not have all the information
about his time in service, but I do know that he was here in 1945. My Grandma
found a little book detailing some of his locations and the action his unit
saw, but it stops in April 1945 and I have pictures from September 1945.
Grandpa took all the photos, and developed them himself–my mom actually found a
letter from him to his aunt, apologizing for not writing sooner, as his spare
time had been devoted to developing pictures. On some of the photos, he wrote
the city and the date, but others were blank. I started with two easy ones,
labeled Brussels and Paris.
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| Brussels 1945 |
Finding the building featured in the Brussels photograph
proved to be quite a challenge. Google image searcher was not helpful. Neither
was googling any combination of the words Brussels, 1945, WWII, history,
photos, etc. Following several hours of non-fruitful internet combing, I just
decided to start using google street-view to roam around the city. Now, before
you picture me sitting at my computer digitally walking up and down the streets
of Brussels, I had a plan. From studying the photograph, I learned some
important information about the street pictured. First: the street pictured was
flat–important because so many of the streets in Brussels are not. Second: both
the road with the building and the road my Grandpa stood on, had streetcar tracks,
and were wider than normal streets. Third: I was able to discern some of the
features of the buildings lining the street, as well as letters on a sign–SAMY.
I looked up streetcar routes in Brussels, and learned that they had changed a lot since 1945, and many had been
paved over in the intervening years, so that lead was out. SAMY didn’t return
any results either. I was left with wide flat streets. I found a couple
possible buildings, but when I showed them to Joe, he did not think they were
the right one. Even after all that searching, when we drove into Brussels, I
had almost nothing to go on.
We were not paying attention, and had left the GPS on silent
as we approached the city, so we missed out exit, and had to take an alternate
route. This actually proved quite fortuitous. Driving in, I was checking every
street, trying to see if any features jumped out at me, or if the building I
was searching for lay at the end. We finally turned onto a long flat street,
and at the end, there is was, the same building my grandfather had photographed
60 years earlier. The streetscape had drastically changed; nothing remained of
the SAMY building or the intricate façade of the building on the left, but
somehow the building in the center of the picture remained unchanged. The building
was not labeled, and when we tried to go inside and get some information, it
was empty and under construction, though most recently it seemed to have been a
bank. As of this moment, I do not know the purpose or history of this building:
it remains shrouded in mystery.
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| Brussels 2011 |
The Paris picture seemed easy; it was of an arch, so I
assumed it was the Arc de Triomphe. Little did I know there were so many arches
in Paris. By the time we reached the Louvre, we had already seen 4. I was
getting a little uncertain about the arch in the photo when we started walking
toward it, and the angles did not match up. However, as we moved closer, we
realized that the arch had two sides, and my grandfather had taken his photo
from the other side. Tiny heart attack averted, and arch photo snapped.
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| Paris 1945 |
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| Paris 2011 |
The final picture I decided to track down during this trip
was a “new” photo. My mom has been away from work on medical leave, and found
some time to scan more photos from my Grandpa. I used images.google.com to try to
track down some of the more obvious pictures. One such a picture was of a rose
window on a cathedral. To my untrained eye, this could any number of rose
windows on any number of cathedrals in Europe. Many look very similar to each
other, and an unlabeled, 60+ year old photograph of only a rose window seemed
difficult to trace. However, google image searcher said it was most likely the
Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. I compared the photos myself and agreed with that
assessment, and Notre Dame was added to our list.
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