BOCA RATON, Fla. — Harold Terens and his fiancée Jeanne Swerlin kissed and held hands like high school sweethearts as they discussed their upcoming wedding in France, a country the World War II veteran first visited as a 20-year-old corporal of the U.S. air force, shortly after D-Day.
Terens, a sociable and energetic 100-year-old, will be honored by the French in June as part of the 80th anniversary of their country’s liberation from the Nazis. Then he plans to marry the cheerful 96-year-old Swerlin in a town near the beaches where American troops landed.
“I love this girl – she is very special,” said Terens, who has been dating Swerlin since 2021. To demonstrate their love of dancing, they had Siri play “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars and jumped, spun and spun like teenagers returning home.
“He’s a great guy, great,” Swerlin said. “He loves me so much and he says so.”
“And my god, he’s the best kisser,” she said.
The couple, both widowed, grew up in New York City: she in Brooklyn, he in the Bronx. They laugh about how differently they experienced the Second World War. She was in high school and dating soldiers who gave her war souvenirs, such as dog tags, knives and even a gun, in an attempt to impress.
Terens enlisted in 1942 and was shipped to Great Britain the following year, where he was attached as a radio repair technician to a four-pilot P-47 Thunderbolt fighter squadron. Terens said his original pilots all died in the war.
“I loved all those guys. Young men. The average age was 26,” he says.
On D-Day – June 6, 1944 – Terens helped repair aircraft returning from France so they could return to the fight. He said half of his company’s pilots died that day.
Terens went to France twelve days later and helped transport freshly captured Germans and recently released American prisoners of war back to England. To him, the Germans seemed lucky because they would survive the war. However, the Americans were abused by their Nazi captors for months and even years.
“They were in shock,” he said.
Then he went on a secret mission – even he didn’t know his destination. His planes hopped around North Africa before finally landing in Tehran. There he survived a robbery that left him naked in the desert and in fear of death until a US Military Police patrol passed by.
He learned the details of his secret mission when he was deposited at a Soviet airfield in Ukraine. As part of a new strategy, US bombers would fly from Britain to attack Axis targets in Eastern Europe. They did not have enough fuel to return, so they would fly to the USSR. Terens’ job was to feed the crews and treat the wounded before flying home on their refueled planes.
Terens soon contracted dysentery, which almost killed him. In another close call, a British bartender refused to serve him after the mandatory closing time, despite his pleas for just one more drink. Moments after he was kicked out, a German missile destroyed the pub.
After the Nazi surrender in May 1945, Terens again helped transport liberated Allied prisoners to England before returning to the US a month later.
He married his wife Thelma in 1948 and they had two daughters and a son. He became vice president of a British conglomerate. They moved from New York to Florida in 2006 after Thelma retired as a French teacher; she died in 2018 after 70 years of marriage. He has eight grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.
Swerlin married at age 21 and was a full-time mother of two girls and a boy before becoming a widow at age 40. Her second husband died after 18 years of marriage. She then lived with Sol Katz for 25 years before he passed away in 2019. She has seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
It was Katz’s daughter, Joanne Schosheim, who introduced her to Terens in 2021.
She met Terens when her children went to camp with his grandchildren years ago and remained friends. She and a friend thought things might work out, so they invited them over for lunch.
“She gave my father so much joy,” Schosheim said of Swerlin. “I didn’t want her to be lonely.”
But after Thelma’s death, Terens was no longer interested in other women and barely noticed Swerlin.
‘I didn’t even look at her. “I didn’t even talk to her,” he said.
“I looked at him. He looked at me,” Swerlin said, but “it looked like nothing.”
Still, Terens’ friend Stanley Eisenberg took them out to dinner the next evening. Eisenberg wanted to see who fired his friend.
It was love at second sight.
“I had never seen him so lit,” Eisenberg said.
Terens couldn’t talk or eat, and that’s not like him.
“I said, ‘You’re in love,’” Eisenberg said. “He said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never had these feelings before. ”
After that date, Swerlin said, Terens didn’t give me a chance to turn him down. At the age of 94, she was also in love.
“He introduced me to the whole world, ‘I want you to meet my girl, my love,’ and I didn’t even know him for more than two days,” she said, laughing. “Falling in love is not just something for young people. We get butterflies, just like everyone else.”
Terens proposed a few months ago, kneeling to give Swerlin a ring.
“She went hysterical” with joy, he said.
“I thought I was supposed to help him up, but he’s so macho,” she said.
The couple and their families will leave for Paris at the end of May, where Terens and a handful of surviving World War II veterans will be honored. Of the 16 million American veterans of World War II, only 120,000 remain, the government says.
It will be Terens’ fourth D-Day celebration in France. Five years ago he received a medal from President Emmanuel Macron.
The families then travel to the town of Carentan-les-Marais, where the couple plans to be married on June 8 by mayor Jean-Pierre Lhonneur in a 17th century chapel. Lhonneur said that because of the American sacrifice on D-Day, more American flags fly in the area than French ones.
“Normandy is the 51st state,” he said.
Lhonneur legally explained that he can only marry city residents, but he thinks the local prosecutor will make him an exception.
“It will be our pleasure,” the mayor said.
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AP writer John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, contributed to this report.
