What a day of complete contrasts. Morning dawned as we woke up in a rural idyll at our campsite between Poitiers and Limoges.
Such a lovely peaceful place with super friendly English owners, we really could have stayed for days. However after a nice chat and buying some duck eggs we headed off mid morning to our destination for today, Oradour sur Glane.
We had first heard of this village when Simon’s mum had visited but nothing can prepare you for the shock of experiencing it yourself.
About 30 mins west of Limoges, first impressions are of a typical small & tidy, quiet, French village. However illusions are soon lost at the visitor centre which explains the horrors of one day in 1944 when over 600 children, women and men (in that order of magnitude) were randomly shot and/or burned alive by some 200 SS nazi troops in revenge for a local uprising following the D-Day landings.
Following the massacre, the village and the bodies were then torched.
After the war, as an act of remembrance the original village was left as it had been found and, with the details and horrors from the museum fresh in our minds, it was these same streets that we we walked around in numbed silence.
Back at the visitors centre there is also a small exhibition trying to tell the stories of as many of the victims as possible, trying to set into some sort of human context the random nature of the killings.
What turns ordinary men – fathers, husbands, brothers – into mindless automatons capable of shooting babies just days old and locking women and schoolchildren into a church before razing it it the ground is beyond all comprehension. But happen it did and here is the evidence to prove it and remind us all of the fragility of what we have.
Tilly's Travels 