A 100-year-old World War II veteran is getting married at a liberation site in France after getting an unexpected second chance at love!
Harold Terens and his fiancée, Jeanne Swerlin, plan to marry in Carentan-les-Marais this summer, 80 years after D-Day, when the Allies invaded the beaches of Normandy, the Associated Press reported.
According to the media, Terence had been married to his late wife Thelma for 70 years when she died in 2018. He wasn’t interested in finding love again when he met Swerlin through the family his grandchildren went to camp with in 2021.
Swerlin, meanwhile, married at 21 and became a widow in her 40s. She then lived with longtime partner Sol Katz for 25 years until he died in 2019. The couple met through Katz’s daughter.
“I didn’t even look at her. I didn’t even talk to her,” Terens told AP their first meeting.
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Terence’s friend, Stanley Eisenberg, took the couple out to dinner the next night, convinced that the couple had met for a reason. Sparks flew so quickly during dinner that night that Eisenberg told the AP his friend could not eat.
The rest, as they say, is history.
“Being in love isn’t just for young people. We get butterflies like everyone else,” Swerlin said, according to the AP, adding that Terence introduced her as “my darling” days into the relationship.
The couple got engaged “a few months ago,” when the veteran got down on one knee and proposed.
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Terence enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942 and first served as a radio repair technician in a squadron of four-pilot P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, the AP reported.
On June 6, 1944, Teren helped repair the planes so they could fight in the Battle of Normandy. Almost two weeks later, he returned to France to help transport captured Germans and liberated American prisoners of war to England.
After being deployed to other missions, Terence again helped bring freed Allied prisoners to England after the surrender of the Nazis in 1945. The AP added that he then returned to the US a month later.
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Terence’s return to France in early June coincides with his fourth D-Day celebration in the country. Five years ago, he received a medal for his service from President Emmanuel Macron.
After celebrating the liberation of the country, the natives of New York and their families will go to Carentan-les-Marais, which is located near the beaches where the American troops landed.
The mayor of the city, Jean-Pierre Lhonneur, plans to marry them in a chapel built in 1600, AP reported.
“I love this girl — she’s pretty special,” Terence told the AP. “He loves me so much and he says it,” Swerlin said of her fiancé, adding, “And my God, he’s the best kisser.”
Between them, the couple has three children, 15 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren.
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Source: HIS Education