After D-Day, U.S. troops fanned out across Normandy and the neighboring western region of Brittany to capture and secure large ports, like Cherbourg and Brest. One family's encounter with a soldier that summer would alter its destiny.
On a recent day this summer, 66-year-old Michelle Salaün walks across a field in Brittany to the house where her mother grew up.
"This is the place, the farm, where my grandfather has been killed and my mother raped, the 20th of August, 1944, at the end of the war, by an American soldier," Salaün says.