Sheep

I consider much of the Europe I’ve had the fortune to visit as a capacious Jewish graveyard. In France, for example, even in the tiniest of villages there often is a plaque affixed to a building’s exterior wall or beneath one’s feet, commemorating the Jews who used to live there, especially those who perished in World War II.

Many streets are named Rue des Juifs, or Street of the Jews; these street signs mean that Jews used to live there.

While in Ireland hiking a portion of the Dingle Way, one evening Alicia and I witnessed a sheepherder in his wellies and his two border collies herding a flock of about 20 fluffy puffballs from their grazing ground into a rather small pen that looked like it might be ideal for, say, about five sheep. I hadn’t known that folks actually engage in this activity and do so successfully; I’d believed that herding I’d seen in films, for example, was the result of dozens of takes. Not so for this gentleman: One try only and the dogs did their job and the sheep followed suit.

I stared at the scene with dropped-jaw; the sheepherder made eye contact and said, “Simple.”

The only words that went through my mind were: “Like sheep to the slaughter.”

About an hour and a half east of Beauvais-sur-Matha, the French village in which we rented a home for a week, stands the charred remains of Oradour-sur-Glane, also known as “Village martyr” or Martyred Village. Each year since its founding in 1946 as a museum that includes historical context, arresting photos and salvaged, every-day objects like shoes, silverware and sewing machines, about 300,000 visit the haunting site. Oradour-sur-Glane is located in what had been Vichy France and is a crumbling monument to the power, false promises and horror of the Third Reich.

The village and its 643 inhabitants were burned to the ground in a scene of literal hellfire on June 10, 1944, by German troops that strategically entered and completely surrounded it, thoroughly trapping inside their homes, dentist offices, hotels, church, cafés and schools every resident of all ages. Six escaped; five survived the war. So badly and comprehensively damaged by fire and fusillade was Oradour-sur-Glane that it looks bombed out, not merely burned. The village’s largely stone structures, girded by wood pillars, pilings and beams, disintegrated in the blast furnace the Nazis purposefully created. Nearly 80 years since the SS carried out what history says likely was an act of revenge for the murder of one of their own, the town is a sick reminder of the wages of war.

I knew that 5 million non-Jews in addition to the 6 million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis in labor and concentration camps in WWII. I had not known before visiting this expansive site, however, that Germans targeted non-Jews en masse outside the confines of death camps. In my mind, at this place, it registered for the first time that regular old French villagers also were targets of the ruthless Nazis. So many of the Jews of Europe during WWII were like sheep to the slaughter; in Oradour-sur-Glane, the townspeople were more like the penned in Irish sheep. In the wake of the death and destruction the SS wrought, did the troops, like the sheepherder, look at one another and say, “Simple”?

We visited the martyred village on Oct. 6; I wrote this on Oct. 7 before we knew what Hamas had done to Israel and, in the intervening weeks, the world.

For more (not all topics are as heavy as this one and they all include photos) my blog can be accessed at: https://francofamille.wordpress.com