His brothers died in WWII, but French admirers keep their memory alive (2024)

Donald Stevens, now 97, was the youngest of the three. When he became the sole survivor on active duty, the military told the teenage seaman second class to go home to prevent more deaths in one family. He refused and wound up relegated to a dead-end assignment in Philadelphia, angry and bereft.

His mother, a quiet woman who kept her grief to herself, sent a letter after the war to the French village where Paul was said to have died. Writing in English, not knowing whether anyone would see her words, Lillian Stevens made a simple request: Could someone please find Paul’s grave and send her a photo?

The response would add a new chapter to her life, and to Donald’s — one that continues to this day. The postmaster and his wife in the village of St. Laurent-sur-Mer found the cross bearing Paul’s name in the American cemetery and wrote back to Lillian with a photo of it. For eight decades since, through multiple generations, the same French family has tended the grave, written and visited with the Stevenses and become Donald’s surrogate kin.

“When we think of the red, white and blue of my flag and the red, white and blue of the French flag — we basically wrapped them together,” Donald Stevens, who lives with his son and daughter-in-law in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, said in an interview. “I have always said that I have dual citizenship. I have one on paper, from here. I have one in my heart.”

A grandson of the postmaster wrote the story of the three brothers in comic book form this year, hoping to appeal to young people and keep the memory alive. His cousin shared the tale with an online site called MyHeritage, which drew attention from French media and led to a round of TV interviews in the run-up to celebrations marking the Allied liberation of France from Nazi control.

“I have a deep feeling of gratitude for the sacrifice of the young boys for our liberty,” Ludovic Adeline said in a telephone interview from his home in St. Laurent-sur-Mer. “My duty was to give the information to the people, a duty of memory.”

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The Stevens brothers grew up during the Depression in the Pennsylvania coal-mining town of Osceola Mills. Only five years separated the three boys, as close as triplets but so different in personality: Paul, the introvert, smart and steady. Bill, athletic, impetuous and quick to fight a bully. Then Donald, impish, a motormouth, friends with everybody.

Their father, who managed a grocery store, was so stern that he wouldn’t let the boys take anything for pain if they had to get a tooth pulled, Donald remembered. “And you better not cry,” he said.

They had a younger brother and sister, too, but it was the three older boys who were inseparable. They played in the woods and spied on out-of-work men on street corners. When World War II broke out, every boy in town who was old enough — many the sons of European immigrants — signed up to fight. Paul went first, despite a skin condition that could have kept him home — wearing a suit and tie as he headed off to basic training.

Eighty years ago this month, Paul was part of the Allied force that hit the Normandy beaches beginning on D-Day, June 6, 1944. At age 20, he was killed almost two weeks later in a foxhole near the town of Saint-Lo. His mother was home alone when the town telegraph operator showed up with the news.

Bill and Donald had been making plans to become football coaches, hopefully at rival high schools where they could compete against each other. But now Bill, who had just graduated high school and gotten a job, decided he had to enlist. He failed one physical and insisted on another until he qualified. Before heading off, Bill wrote a poem for Paul that concluded:

He cannot come back/It’s now up to me,/To go where he’s gone/So together we’ll be.

Hobbled by infected feet, Bill wound up in the Army’s 10th Armored Division, crammed into a halftrack with four other young soldiers. On April 1, 1945 — Easter Sunday — a German shell blew up the halftrack as it headed toward Berlin. Bill was 19.

It would be five years before the U.S. government officially identified his remains on the battlefield. Bill and his comrades were too intermingled to be individually recovered, so the remains were taken as a group and interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

Donald, who had enlisted in the Navy as soon as he graduated high school, was told that he could no longer deploy into combat. Congress had enacted the “Sullivan law,” named for five brothers from Iowa killed when their ship was sunk in the Pacific, to prevent any single family from such catastrophic loss.

But Donald Stevens didn’t dare walk the streets of his hometown when other boys were still fighting, he said. So he stayed in the Navy, mired in a nothing assignment, until the war ended.

The five-year period of the war was “kind of a lost time,” Stevens says now. All the dreams and plans that he and his brothers shared had been put on hold, and then canceled forever. He was angry, adrift. He drank at an American Legion hall, dragging stories out of combat veterans who were reluctant to relive the horrors of war.

Then his mother sent her humble plea to France.

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Charles and Germaine Olard ran the post office in the town of St. Laurent-sur-Mer. When Lillian Stevens’s letter arrived in 1946, it began a close relationship that endured for the remaining 15 years of her life.

“War was on my mother’s mind almost all the time,” Donald Stevens said. “And she lost more than any of the rest of us because my brother Paul, who is the one killed in Normandy, was a carbon copy of her. They both had that idea that if the sun comes up in the morning, it’s going to be a great day.”

Germaine Olard was someone with whom Lillian Stevens could share her feelings of loss and pride. The two women became like long-distance sisters, Donald said, despite the fact that neither spoke the other’s language. Each would have to tap someone else to translate their letters — in Lillian’s case, the local high school French teacher.

Ludovic Adeline, 64, a grandson of Charles and Germaine Olard, remembers how the families remained close even after Lillian Stevens died in 1959.

“When I was a kid at my grandparents’ home, I used to see my grandmother with letters from the U.S.,” Adeline said. “Every Christmas, happy new year, and sometimes she received parcels with clothes for the kids.”

“We grew up with the story,” said Sylvie Laillier, 54, Adeline’s cousin and a granddaughter of the Olards (her mother and Adeline’s were sisters). “I saw so many gifts coming from the States each Christmas. Flowers, cakes — many things. And when the American family came to visit my family, it was a very big moment.”

The families began trading visits every few years in the 1970s. The younger generations kept up the tradition as older relatives died — putting flowers on Paul Stevens’s grave two or three times a year, rubbing sand from Omaha Beach into his and other headstones to make the letters stand out.

Adeline, a retired book shop owner, spent years toying with the idea of writing about the brothers and the families so that the tale would stay alive. Finally he settled on making a comic book. “I thought it was the best way to transmit the story to young people,” he said.

“The Three Stevens Brothers” came out this year in French and English versions.

Though thoughts of his brothers never left him, Donald Stevens said the book and recent attention have made them feel more present than ever. MyHeritage, the site where Laillier shared the family history, used new technology to create “living images” of his brothers from family photographs. Stevens’s son showed them to him for the first time this week.

First Paul — smiling slightly, blinking, looking side to side — then Bill. “There he is,” Donald Stevens said, then his breath caught, and his eyes filled with tears at the young men come to life. “Oh, boy. Oh, my word.” Composing himself, Stevens gestured at the photographs. “So they never grew up beyond that. That’s the oldest I ever knew them.”

He, on the other hand, built the life his brothers never got to have. He married a childhood sweetheart, earned an engineering degree and had a long career developing computer technology. His daughter died of cancer as a teenager; Stevens lives now with his son, Scott, a professor at James Madison University. His grandson has a successful career in Maryland. His wife died in 2017 after 68 years of marriage, but “we had so, so much fun,” he said.

Stevens thinks about what it might mean, that he lived and his brothers didn’t. Maybe that’s the way it had to be. They helped defeat a terrible foe, and they might not like the world today. Years ago, Stevens identified about 20 factors in the country’s quality of life — from infrastructure to balance of incomes and world trade — and gave each a numerical ranking. Every year, he would reevaluate. They all got worse.

Now he looks around and sees division everywhere. America’s foes use the internet to inflame tensions. “Divide and conquer is working. We are divided and I think we’re being conquered. My opinion,” Stevens said.

He only knows one long-term solution, and it’s the same thing that saved the Stevenses from their terrible loss: connection. “We have to come back to where we can talk to each other, trust each other,” he said. Like family.