AndyC wrote:Google the story of Oradour-sur-Glane and read about the kind of horrors your forefathers helped to liberate Europeans from; you might even visit there some day, in which case your (perhaps) casual appreciation will turn to a very, very deep reverence indeed that such men lived.
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I have
been to Oradour-sur-Glane. It is seared into my memory. I have a lot of pictures I took there. If you're a FaceBook friend of mine, you can see them here:
https://www.facebook.com/annoyedman/med ... 189&type=3
The massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane occurred on June 10, 1944, just 4 days after the D-Day landings. In support of the landings, the French resistance went crazy all over France as part of an attempt to nail down German troops in those areas of resistance, so that those troops would not be relocated to Normandy and thrown into the fight against the Allies. In the part of France where Oradour-sur-Glane is located, there are 3 or 4 towns by the name of "Oradour", all of which are not that far away from the others. They are differentiated by the names of the rivers on which they are located. Thus, "Oradour-sur-Glane" is "Oradour on the Glane River". I've actually
been in one of the other Oradours also. Anyway, this part of France had an extremely active and quite heroic Resistance movement, known as the "Maquis", and they participated very actively in this behind-the-lines disruption of the Nazi war machine.
So what happened was that, on or just after D-Day, a Maquillard cell in the region from nearby Oradours-sur-Vayres had blown up some railroad tracks, halting a train with a bunch of German officers on board. The Maquis executed the Germans. In retaliation, the German SS attacked Oradour-sur-Glane, mistaking it for Oradour-sur-Vayres. The Nazis murdered 647 men, women and children. They separated the men and older boys from the women and children. The men and boys were herded into small groups against stone walls where they were machine gunned. The women and small children were herded into the local church, where they were machine gunned in the legs so they could not escape, and then the church was burned down around them. All but one of the women and children inside perished. One teenaged girl escaped by jumping out a window, breaking her leg in the fall, but she managed to drag herself to safety and hid until the Germans left. One 12 year old boy who was part of a group of males that was machine gunned in the garden behind a store was actually unhurt and was buried under the bodies of the men falling around him. Later, after night fell, he crawled out from under those bodies and left the store, through the front door, where he ran smack into 2 SS soldiers who were standing guard. One of them looked at him and said, "RUN....go NOW". He did. The Germans threw 12 or so bodies down the village well. The well is still there. A few meters away from the well is the town's cemetery where the victims of the atrocity are all buried. I couldn't go in there. By the time I got to the cemetery, I was completely undone.
As a side-note, we actually visited Oradour-sur-Vayres by accident the same day, while we were looking for Oradour-sur-Glane. The mayor himself greeted us in the town square and invited us into the city hall to view some momentos from the war. While we were there, he told us about how the townsfolk found and buried the crew of a Canadian Lancaster bomber that had crashed earilier in the war. The crew were all killed, and the local residents knew that the SS would exploit their bodies for propaganda purposes, or to desecrate them. So they gathered up the crew's remains and buried them under pseudonyms in the local cemetery just off the town square. But they hid the crew's identity cards from the Germans, and they kept track of who was actually buried in each pseudonymous grave. After their area was liberated, they went back and put the crewmembers' proper names on each gravestone. The mayor was very proud of this story.
Andy's right. We make fun of the French for being "surrender monkeys" etc., etc., but not one single member of this forum, myself included, has ever had to spend 5 or 6 years of their lives living under the bootheel of Nazi oppression. My (French) mother did. To this day, despite her relative wealth, she can never have enough money to feel secure. She remembers eating cats and rats to survive.
