11 November 2002

Oradour-sur-Glane

War is real in Europe.  War is impossible to forget.  As an American I could not understand this until I came here.  Maybe I still don’t understand.  Maybe I don’t want to.

Our lovely house in Senlis, France has bullet holes put there by the German Nazis.  Our landlord can’t stand the sound of fireworks because it reminds him of those bullet holes.  This big stone house replaced a 400-year-old farmhouse that the Germans burned during WW I.  And there were wars here for centuries before modern times.

In The US the wars most of us know about were learned from books…wars that happened to someone else and were fought on distant shores. 

Even the stories of war that my dad and uncles brought back from WWII went unspoken.  My generation’s war experiences, Vietnam and the Gulf War were cleanly documented in living color on the nightly news.  The programs were something to be turned off when we had watched enough. 

The veterans of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, including my brother came home but there was no glory and little spoken about the “truth” and consequences of war.  My brother still pays the price of war.

Something inside of me cries out at the insanity of killing other people’s children in the name of power and greed.  Call me a “hippie” or a liberal or soft.  I don’t care.  War boils down to insanity to me and it tears at my soul.

On our vacation trip around France we happened upon Oradour-sur-Glane.  Oradour is located very near Limoges, a big city in the central part of France.

On June 10, 1944, just 4 days after the famous battle called “D-Day” the German Nazis decided to pay a visit to this small town. The Nazis rounded everybody up and sent all of the men to the big barn.  The women and children were ordered to go to the Catholic church in the heart of the small business area.

The truth is that no one was worried, even when the Nazis sat pointing huge machine guns at the entrance of the barn.  The town hadn’t seen any soldiers in over two years and the people of the region were sympathetic to the Nazi regime. 

These small town people weren’t powerful or politicians.  They were just families going about the business of raising their kids, and trying to get through life the best they could.

When the German Nazis opened fire they killed all but 6 young men.  Then they smoke bombed the church but that didn’t kill enough of the women and children so then they set fire to it.  Two women escaped.  They shot the first woman with her baby.  The other woman lived to tell the story of how the soldiers burned the entire town to the ground killing 642 people. 

Because this horrible event occurred just after D-Day and to the French, the tale mostly was lost to the rest of the world.  But General Charles DeGaulle, a war hero who later became president decreed that the town would not be rebuilt.  He wanted the world to never forget what war looked like.

On our visit to Oradour we were overcome by the site of an entire town sitting in ruin.  There were two horses grazing by the town’s stonewall as if they had just been put out to pasture, and left there.  The place was a disturbing sight to see.

The stonewalls of the buildings that housed the butcher, the baker, the auto repair, the tailor and the homes of everyday people sit quietly as a reminder of the senselessness of war.  The baby carriages, the sewing machines, the pots hanging over the long cold fireplaces, the overhead electric lines are all sitting as they were that day in 1944. 

As I walked around looking at this time frozen site I found myself growing angry.  I just couldn’t believe that each generation seems to forget the price of war. 

Visiting a French or English cemetery brings out the same anger as I felt at Oradour…the same sense of frustration.  I ask myself, “When will we learn that war is insanity and no one wins?”