Now, this is a story that I read in the paper as I sat in a cafe near here, in downtown Amiens. It almost knocked me off my stool. The lady who runs the place let me have the page it was written on, and so now I'm trying to do a quick translation for you.-- Quintus

Monday 21 January 2002, Le Courrier Picard (Amiens, France)

A Village in the Oise (a region between Paris and Amiens, northern France--Quintus) Sends Back Dollars for the September 11th Victims

After having received $200,000 from the USA to reconstruct the church windows, destroyed by a bombardment in 1944, the Remy Caretakers association sends the leftover money back to the families of the September 11th victims.

The Remy Caretakers association (Remy is a village of 1150 inhabitants in the Oise) has made a gift of $65,000 to the September 11th Victims Support Group, money left over from the $200,000 received from American donors in 1998 to restore their church, damaged during the Second World War.

"Our project had been to keep doing restorations and to get an organ, but faced with the horror of the September 11th attacks in the United States, a special meeting of the association voted unanimously to turn this sum over to the Twin Towers Fund to come to the aid of the victims' families," explains Nicole Quertelet, president of the association.

The friendly relations between the inhabitants of Remy and American veterans date from August 2nd 1944, when a patrol of P-51 Mustangs from the US Air Force, ordered to stop the movements of the German Army from the rear towards the front, carried out a rocket attack on a rail convoy in the village, not knowing that it was filled with ammunition.

Roy Blaha, from Linden, California, patrol leader, set off an enormous explosion whose blast was to prove fatal to his wing-man and best friend, Houston Lee Braly, age 22, of Brady, Texas, whose craft, its tail torn away, crashed into the earth.

The windows of the magnificent 18th century church, as well as a good part of the village, were swept away by the explosion, which also caused a great deal of death among the population.

The villagers managed to pull out the remains of the pilot, a college student who had joined up the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in order to bury him in the small local cemetary. Flowers were placed on his tomb every day until the end of hostilities, when the American Army repatriated the body for final burial in his home town.

"Windows for Remy"

50 years later, Roy Blaha came back to the scene in the company of several veterans from his unit, and noticing the lack of windows, they decided to start a drive to finance the replacement of the works, and to thank the inhabitants for their devotion to their departed friend, whose name is now given to the main square of the village.

Once back in the USA, they thus founded "Windows for Remy" in Linden, creating an internet site (www.remy.org) and succeeding in 4 years to raise $200,000. Thanks notably to an influential member of the organization, who put his energy into the service of the cause: Rudolf Giuliani, ex-mayor of New York, who was still in office at the time of the attacks.

The windows were inaugurated in June 2000 in the presence of Roy Blaha, now 81, and of an important delegation from the US, of the Ambassador from that country and of French and American veterans associations.

So it is today that the story unrolls in the opposite direction. And it is from a desire to support, notably, the "families of the firefighters and police who perished heroically while helping without hesitation their fellow citizens", concluded Mrs. Quertelet, that these $65,000 are going back across the Atlantic.