On This Day 80 Years Ago.......

[mushroom25]

the soldiers came......

https://x.com/i/status/1800079796438749216

https://www.oradour.info/

 

[jourdain2]

We lived about 45 mins. away from Oradour-sur-Glane.  I have been there several times since we always took visitors there.

Once seen, neverforgotton.  I reached the stage where I couldn't visit any more, it was too hard. The twisted heap of half-melted church bell and the bullet marks in the confessionals cannot be unseen.

A friend's father had been in the Resistance - some 30 miles away.  They saw the flames in the sky in the night and he and some others went the next morning, taking my friend- then 12.

Rene (my friend) said that the walls were still smoking, with wisps of flame and that he never forgot the scenes as they went round, trying to find anyone alive.  

 

[Lie-in King]

A simply dreadful, unconscionable action.  Thank you for the reminder, mushroom.

[bhg481]

This makes the Hamas attack last October pale into insignificance. We visited Oradour in 2014 and the sights there make the concentration camp deeds seem tame.

[maggiebee]

Man's inhumanity to man in plain sight. So sad.

[naomi24]

Bhg, not to diminish or undermine the appalling atrocities here but I really don't think anyone can truly say the sights there make the concentration deeds seem tame.  That is an insult to the victims.

[david small]

Absolutely harrowing. A permanent scar upon German wanton brutality. Man's inhumanity laid bare. No wonder I prefer animals. Only humans could perpetuate such intentional and prolonged suffering and violence.

[bhg481]

naomi - we just felt it was the way the people were treated that was more cruel than the concentration camps. The people in the camps simply thought they were going for a shower and found themselves dead. Others were treated cruelly by the guards who had been brainwashed into believing they were just removing inferior beings from the population and some of the cruelty you could put down to "laddish" behaviour where one guard would try to outdo another. In the case of Oradour a defeated army on the run just killed the residents out of spite in a manner which would have terrified them.

[jourdain2]

The SS unit which wasted Oradour comprised French troops from Alsace mixed with German in (I think) proportionally more French than German. 

It was Saturday, so most people were in the small town and not away at work. Unfortunately, it was the day of the annual school photograph so all the children who lived outside Oradour and would not normally be there - were. 

One litle boy, sent to live there fore safety,had seen an SS unit in action before and ran away to hide in the fields, he was 1 of two survivors.  The other was a woman who was shepherded into the church with the other women and children - where they were machine-gunned before the church was burned in case any survived.  The had hidden behind the altar when first driven in and she scrambled out of the window when it began.  She fell 20' or so, was injured, but rolled away to survive.

It was over in a day - unlike the horrors of the extended cruelty of the concentration camps.  OH, during his Nat. Service in Germany in '52/'54 visited Belsen before it was sanitised; no bodies, but pretty horrible.  He was with another soldier who had been in the 1st arrivals there at the end of the war.

I quote what OH has told me this man said.

"You could smell it before you could see it.  It was true that there was no birdsong. There were piles of bodies and these half-human skeletons flinching away from us as we entered. They expected to be beaten. A picture of Hell caused by humans."

Both Belsen and Oradour are atrocities and must not be forgotten. I'm frightened that the same sort of callousness to life not only exists, but seems to be growing, today.