On an overcast evening last September, at a beachside hotel in Vigo, on Spain's northwest coast, I took my seat next to the bride at a dinner table reserved for her and her groom's closest family. The seat assignment was an honor, especially considering that Nathalie Madjar and I had met just once before, three months earlier.
After dinner and speeches, everyone gathered around a piano, and the groom, Florent, sang Elton John's "Your Song," dedicating it to Nathalie and me. I never imagined I could feel so connected to someone with whom I'd only ever spent half a day. A clipping of the newspaper story detailing Murray Simon and Jacques Madjar's unlikely friendship. In the middle of the night on May 6, , my grandfather Murray Simon, a year-old American bomber pilot, parachuted out of a flaming plane, shot down by Nazis over German-occupied France.
It was his 12th and final mission during World War II. The six other crew members were preparing to drop ammunition and supplies into France to support the Resistance. As the story goes, they were to release 12 canisters of explosives into the French countryside, blowing up railroad tracks to thwart Nazi movement ahead of a secret operation in which Allied troops would fight Nazi soldiers on the beaches of Normandy.
Their plane was flying at 5, feet when a German night fighter blasted them with 20mm flak guns, hitting the gas tank and setting the B Liberator ablaze. After dumping the cargo and ordering the crew to bail, Murray was the last man to jump. He pulled his parachute's rip cord and landed in a tree. Farmers and Nazis in the rural village of Mably, jolted awake by the commotion, watched the plane come crashing down in the woods nearby.
Madjar sent a runner to deliver a coded message to the underground: He had the Allied pilot. Send help. A 6'1" Jew wearing an American uniform, Murray hid in a drainage ditch as Third Reich troops went door-to-door in search of fallen enemies, all of whom survived the crash. He slept intermittently until daybreak, when an elderly French farmer passed by. Shhhh , Murray gestured to the villager, who had seen him but did not stop. Ten minutes later, though, the Frenchman returned to the ditch with Dr.
