LA VALLEE-MULATRE, France -- The letter arrived from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. "Dear Eliot, the last page of a long story has just been turned. Our father, Albert, died two weeks ago. Both our fathers wrote a very great part of our history together. Times are different for your country." State Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, reflected on those words.

"Albert" was Albert Vaillant, one of four French farmers who lied, stole and risked their lives to hide Shapleigh's father, Eliot Shapleigh Sr., after he parachuted into Nazi- occupied France during World War II.

"These men now have passed away, but their legacy of fighting for freedom will never pass away," the senator said. Of his father's four rescuers, only one, Marcel Closset, survives. Marie-Josée Vaillant died of cancer in the 1970s. Pierre Maes died last September. And in their thoughtfully worded letter, Albert Vaillant's children informed Shapleigh that their father died in November. Shapleigh's father died of pancreatic cancer at age 70 in 1991.

After World War II, Shapleigh Sr. went on to a successful business career in El Paso and raised three equally successful boys. None of it would have happened, however, had he not survived the accidental crash of his P-51 Mustang on its way to Czechoslovakia, 10 days before D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Fifty-eight years ago today, the Allies invaded France. That day marked the beginning of the end of World War II. For Shapleigh Sr. and other U.S. pilots who had crash-landed or parachuted into Northern France near the Belgian border, it marked the beginning of a countdown to their return home.

The Maeses This April, at a small farm in Tupigny, Marie-Therèse Maes respectfully laid on her kitchen table the family's prized possession -- a pilot's whistle given to them by Eliot Shapleigh Sr. 58 years ago as a token of gratitude to her late husband, Pierre Maes. She picked it up and put it back down carefully as she told her story. On May 27, 1944, Lt. Shapleigh bailed out of his fighter plane when the engine conked out. He broke his ankle and limped toward the relative safety of the dark forest of Andigny. A lumberjack gave Shapleigh butter cookies but left him in the forest. That afternoon, a young farmer named Pierre Maes was on his way to drain a pond and came face to face with the equally surprised Shapleigh. The American put out his hands, as if waiting to be handcuffed. The French man laughed and carried him on his back all the way to the family farm. Both men were 23. "I think that's why (Maes) did it. (Shapleigh) was a young one, like him," Marie-Therèse Maes said. Shapleigh wasn't the only downed American pilot in the area. About a dozen had white-knuckle landings in either their crippled planes or strapped into their parachutes. They had been flying over the area between their base in England and their targets in Germany.

To this day, local farmers remember fondly the American airmen they helped, calling them by their first names, "Eliot," "Clyde." Those friendships and memories came at the greatest risk. At a D-Day museum in Normandy, a yellowed Nazi warning dated 1941 reads: "Any person of masculine gender who helps directly or indirectly the crews ... of enemy planes by aiding their escape or hiding them or helping them in any other way, will immediately be shot to death."

Another warning dated July 10, 1942, added that the male relatives of such a person, including brothers-in-law and cousins, would also be shot to death. Women would be sent to concentration camps in Germany, the warning went on. At the Maes farm, Pierre Maes' father was growing nervous with the frequent visits of German soldiers looking for the downed plane's pilot.

After two days, he commanded his son to turn Shapleigh over to members of the French Resistance. Before leaving, Shapleigh slipped his whistle in Maes' hand. "(Pierre) never parted with it," his widow said. The Clossets German soldiers and the jackbooted Gestapo regularly roamed the countryside in 1944 because under the seemingly peaceful surface worked a vibrant Resistance network with about 250 members. The Resistance fighter who came to the Maes farm to see about the downed American pilot was Marcel Closset, who was then 29 and "hot-headed." "We were young. We listened to (Resistance leader Gen. Charles) de Gaulle on the (London) radio, and we were fed up with the German occupation," said Closset, now 87. "We blew up bridges, hid in fields and the forest." But rescuing an American soldier would be the greatest act of defiance against the Nazis. "We had almost gotten one," said Closset, an excited smile rejuvenating his wrinkled face.

A little before Shapleigh landed near the forest, another American pilot had fallen into a tree. But that man was so badly wounded that the Resistance told Closset and his friends to smuggle him out of the region for medical treatment. So, when Closset heard about Shapleigh, he couldn't wait to meet him. The two men, who relied on Shapleigh's Army-issued foreign phrase book to communicate, became fast friends.

Always on the move, they stayed in the forest and in neighboring fields, avoiding Nazi roadblocks. Nowadays, Closset and his wife, Alice, live in a traditional French farmhouse and raise cows and chickens. The interior, however, is unexpected. "Here, everything is El Paso," Closset said. On his walls are copies of paintings of desert dunes by Tom Lea and Native Americans by Manny Acosta, a U.S. flag and a menu of La Posta Restaurant in Old Mesilla. Closset writes with an El Paso Museum of Art pen. He wears "El Paso, Texas" T-shirts. They are all souvenirs from their 10 or so visits to the hometown of the man he rescued.

The Vaillants In June 1944, however, Closset was desperate for a permanent hideout for Shapleigh, a place where the American could nurse his throbbing ankle. Closset took Shapleigh to the home of his sister and her husband: a farm at La Vallée-Mulâtre, on the north side of the forest. In their children's bedroom, Marie-Josée and Albert Vaillant hastily plastered a false wall, cutting the space into two. The entrance to the secret room, a trap door near the floor, was camouflaged by their sons' bed and crib. There Shapleigh stayed still and quiet during the day, as Nazi soldiers had decided to use this farm as one of their headquarters and often walked in and out of the boys' bedroom. At night, the American crawled out of the room, and under the cover of dark, shook off his stiffness in the nearby fields. Sometimes he went on sabotage missions with his Resistance friends. Many nights he cried for home. This lasted three long months. At the same time, the Vaillants were hiding another Allied soldier in their attic.

The danger of the situation was evident to his late parents, said Gérard Vaillant, their third son, who was not born at the time. It wasn't rare to be betrayed by neighbors who talked to the Nazis for favors or under torture. Albert Vaillant was not a member of the French Resistance. He was a family man and a farmer. "But he was a man of character. He couldn't stand the invasion of his country, and he thought it was normal to help out," Gérard Vaillant said. Shapleigh was reunited with his compatriots in the beginning of September 1944, as American troops painstakingly made their way through French villages, liberating them from the German invaders. Shapleigh and the Vaillants kept in touch through letters, and in 1980, Gérard Vaillant took his father to El Paso. "It was a great moment," he recalled. Marie-Josée Vaillant died of cancer at age 63. Her husband lived until the age of 95. Strong-willed until the end, Albert Vaillant drove his car until the age of 91 and didn't quit working the farm until he was 93. The two families established a bond, and in time, Vaillant family members went to El Paso. The Shapleigh sons, Ballard, Eliot Jr. and Colby, visited La Vallée-Mulâtre as vacationing college students.

When in France, Sen. Shapleigh met people who had kept pieces of his father's wrecked plane and who could still recall a day-to-day account of the events. "This story captures a larger-than-life era," said the senator, sitting in his Central El Paso office recently. "These young men of different cultures and those four months defined their entire lives and our countries."