She was 14 when an American pilot was shot down near her home in France. 80 years later, she keeps his memory alive.

SAINT-ELLIER-LES-BOIS, France — It’s been almost 80 years, but Marie Bastien said the memory of the American fighter plane shot down near her village in northern France remains as vivid as ever.

“I still see it, as if it were yesterday,” Bastien, 94, told NBC News in French last week, ahead of widespread celebrations across France on June 6 for the 80th anniversary of the landing, when more 150,000 American, British and Canadian forces charged the beaches of Normandy to liberate the Nazi-occupied country from fascism.

Bastien was only 14 years old when 1st Lt. Paul Chaufty’s fighter was shot down, but since then she has worked hard to keep his memory alive with her daughter Mireille and her wider network of friends and family.

Her hard work paid off, and last Saturday she was alongside some of Chaufty’s American relatives at the unveiling of a plaque honoring his memory in the village of Saint-Ellier-les-Bois.

Bastien said Chaufty died on Aug. 13, 1944, the day Allied forces drove Nazi occupiers from her home village of Ciral, two months after D-Day.

Chaufty, a U.S. Air Force pilot, was flying an armed reconnaissance mission when his P-47 Thunderbolt plane was hit by enemy fire, according to an Army report two days later.

The report said Chaufty managed to get out of his plane, but his parachute ruptured and he fell to his death in a nearby field. His plane crashed about a kilometer and a half away, between Ciral and Saint-Ellier-les-Bois.

Bastien said his father, Maurice, saw the plane and then went looking for Chaufty’s body, finding it the next day under his parachute. They were able to identify him by his dog tags, she added.

“They brought him in a jeep to our backyard, and that’s when I saw him,” she said, adding that Chaufty’s body was being prepared for burial there.

At one point, she said, “they asked us if we wanted to give a sheet and take the parachute, but we said, ‘No, he has to be buried with his parachute.’ »

Four days later, he was buried in a temporary U.S. military cemetery in the nearby town of Gorron, according to military records. His body was later returned to Fairview Cemetery in his hometown of Carthage, New York.

While Bastien worked hard to keep Chaufty’s memory alive in France, his great-niece Nicole Saunders, 53, said she knew little about her grandfather’s brother Melvin Chaufty.

“What I knew growing up was just that he was a pilot, you know, for the United States Air Force and he was shot down over France in 1944, and that’s everything I ever knew,” Saunders said. “I think the family really didn’t have a lot of answers about, you know, where in France did this happen or anything like that.

The youngest of nine children, Saunders said Chaufty grew up during the Great Depression. Unable to realize her dream of becoming a pilot in America, she said he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force before World War II, before transferring to the United States Air Force after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Saunders said Bastien’s daughter, Mireille, 61, contacted her family through a genealogist who forwarded her a letter from her mother. They later connected through email and a WhatsApp group she created in February, she said.

Mireille said it was “very moving to know that he was someone like us but who ultimately died, a hero.”

Nearly 80 years after the death of her great-uncle, Saunders joined the woman who had worked so hard to keep his memory alive as a stone plaque was unveiled in Saint-Ellier-les-Bois, near the place where he was found. Fittingly, he was wrapped in a parachute.

Describing the event as “super emotional”, Saunders said it was “really touching” to be “there with the family of the person who found him”.

Saunders was also taken to the crash site, where local historians and enthusiasts, some dressed in World War II-era uniforms, were ready to ask a steady stream of questions about her great-uncle. A radio amateur also installed an antenna on the outskirts of the village to broadcast the ceremony.

Saunders said it was “really special” that Bastien worked so hard to keep his great-uncle’s memory alive.

Bastien, who briefly left a hospital where she was being treated for a heart condition and a broken wrist, said the ceremony “made me happy.”

“I always said we had to do something,” she said.

Tony Brown reported from Saint-Ellier-Les-Bois and Meagan Fitzgerald from London.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com