He was 20 years old when he first came to Normandy. He came back at 100 — to get married.

In June 1944, Harold Terens was a young U.S. Army Air Forces corporal in England, repairing P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes so they could go back into battle over France on D-Day. Half his company’s pilots didn’t come home that day.

Twelve days later, he traveled to Normandy himself — transporting freed American prisoners of war back to England, picking up newly captured Germans, moving through a landscape still raw with the violence of war.

He was 20 years old.

Eighty years later, he came back.

This time in a pale blue suit, a war medal pinned to his lapel, walking into the stone town hall of Carentan — just five miles from Utah Beach — to marry Jeanne Swerlin, 96.

To the sound of “I Will Always Love You,” they said I do.

Their combined age was nearly 200 years.
Their love story was barely three years old.

Harold and Jeanne both grew up in New York City — he in the Bronx, she in Brooklyn — but never crossed paths. Both moved to Florida. Both were widowed. In 2021, a mutual friend quietly suggested they meet for dinner. Harold had sworn off dating. He went anyway.

“I am blessed that I am going to be married to the most beautiful girl. The smartest girl I’ve probably ever known, the wittiest, the best dancer, the most fun,” he said the week before the wedding.

Jeanne had her own version: “I waited 96 years to find the right man — and now I have a wedding fit for a queen.”

Harold chose Normandy deliberately.

“I came here to invite all those soldiers buried on Omaha Beach — 9,836 of them — to my wedding,” he said. “I want them to know they’re not forgotten.”

Then that evening, they attended a state dinner at the Élysée Palace in Paris — guests of French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Joe Biden, who congratulated them to a standing ovation from the room.

Not a bad wedding night for a 100-year-old from the Bronx.