on a summer day 1944, the soldiers came…. this was the first i’d heard of oradour sur glanes on an episode of the world at war i was watching while my girlfriend was living in france. i checked the map, it wasn’t far from where she was staying. we hired a car, i drove it to oradour sur glanes.
the village oradour sur glanes was rebuilt after the war, next to the site of the original village, now preserved as a reminder of the horrors of the war which destroyed so much, the repercussions of which are still reverberating throughout the political world nearly eighty years later.
oradour sur glanes like many places throughout france, shares it’s name with many other villages. testament to the region’s provincial history that, like the one village in gaul which refused to bow to ceaser in the asterix adventures, today struggles with the might of a more homogenised modern culture. alas the nazi soldiers who were told to storm oradour sur glanes fell upon this oradour sur glanes, a different oradour sur glanes… the wrong oradour sur glanes.
here there was no armed resistance to the nazi forces retreating back through the country after the storming the beaches in operation overlord. here the residents were easily rounded up. divided by gender. women and children were marched to the church. men to a trench nearby and shot while those in the church awaited their fate. their fate was no more merciful. then their homes were set on fire.
when we arrived there the museum was closed. the gates were locked. we couldn’t get in. undeterred, round the back we went, out of sight from the rebuilt town, sneaking along the wall…over the wall, and in. nobody saw. nobody charged us money. i start shooting…i mean taking photos. i took as many as i could as we wandered through the derelict streets until a guard came wandering up the road. rumbled. he cam up to speak, somehow he knew to speak english..perhaps i smelt of roast beef.. i half expected him to accost me for not paying an entrance fee, and to kick me out unceremoniously. i expected to have to protest, ‘who’s the nazi now?! i’m just recording this for future generations lest we forget, ye big frenchie get yer webbed hand off of me cheese breath!’ i mean ok it wasn’t going to help my case and may have gotten me arrested for racist jibes, but i was pumped up ready to strike… luckily for me i didn’t have to embarrass myself, he was nice. he told us they were closing, he was just about to get his bike and he would show us the gate when he came back. when he came back he saw that i was still engrossed in taking photos so he left us there saying,’just close the gate after you leave’. we walked all around, past the gate he had left for us and left through the cemetery gates. they’d been open all along…in fact the lock didn’t even work so there was no need for any amount of sneakery….could have just walked in without scuffing my jacket and getting mud on me…
the town’s eerie remoteness, enhanced by the burnet out houses and cars, bed frames and bicycles is evidence of how much lasting damage and heartache men can make of what has been created by men with just a few guns and some fire.
at the beginning of world war two a single bomb dropped from a single plane would do well to destroy a whole house, nevermind a whole street. the last two bombs dropped in world war two destroyed everything within one square mile on impact. one person sitting 260m from the epicentre of the explosion in hiroshima left only a shadow on a wall having absorbed the heat from the fireball which bleached the surrounding concrete. the firestorm and shockwave that followed the explosion was 2.2miles in diameter within which there was a 0.8 mile radius of lethal radioactive fallout.
each of the missiles currently harboured in the uk under the name ‘trident’ have eight times the destructive power of the single bomb that was dropped on hiroshima.
no bombs were dropped at oradur sur glanes.
brian swaddling 