We heard about Oradour by way of a chance encounter with an Englishman living in Montignac, and decided to stop there en route to the Loire Valley.

The old village of Oradour-sur-Glane was small but thriving, renowned for nothing in particular until a troop of Nazi soldiers destroyed it in June 1944. For reasons still not understood – Oradour was hardly a hotbed of the Resistance – the soldiers massacred the entire village, looted the buildings and then set them on fire. The atrocities were particularly horrible: men were taken into barns and shot in the legs, then set alight. Women and children were herded into the church and then burned alive (this took a long time as the initial incendiary device failed.) A baby was baked to death in an oven. 642 people died; only a handful of survivors escaped to tell their stories, and the rest of the tale was deciphered by French aid workers and people from the local area who searched the ruins trying to find their relatives, piecing together the grisly evidence. We were particularly moved by stories of parents who came looking for their little children who had been at school that day. Oradour had several schools and in each one, bags and coats were to be found hanging in place on their hooks, but the children had all been massacred.

The old  village was never rebuilt. Charles de Gaulle ordered that it be preserved as the soldiers left it; it serves as both a memorial to the fallen and an immensely sad reminder of what the human race continues to be capable of.