Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
"Four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town of Oradour in the rolling farm country of the Limousin and rounded up its inhabitants. In the marketplace they divided the men from the women and children. The men were marched off to barns nearby and shot. The soldiers locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building (and the rest of the town) on fire. Those residents of Oradour who had been away for the day, or had managed to escape the roundup, returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation."University of Iowa history professor Sarah Farmer'sMartyred Villageis not, however, a book about that massacre, but about how the French people have chosen to remember it in the years since. How did the massacre at Oradour become a symbol for the French experience at the hands of the occupying German forces? What went into the decision to create no monument to the dead but to allow the ruined husk of a village to remain as permanent testimony to what happened? And what do visitors to those ruins experience when they go there today? How have the residents of the "new town," adjacent to the scene, dealt with their position? These are some of the questions that Farmer addresses in her precise examination of the relationship between individual remembrances and the collective commemorations of history.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.