This is day’s 5-7 of my post of our RS tour in May. I’m trying to post the tour as seen and experienced through my eyes;
Day 5 Oradour-sur-Glane and Sarlat
The next few days were the favourite of my trip. We left Chinon and visited a small French village that for the life of me I can’t remember the name of. Nothing special about the village except that it was a small and rural. It is part of the RS unique experience to immerse you into the local culture. The town mayor who barely speaks any English toured us around. One of our tour members who has been learning French for the past few years in anticipation of her dream trip to France was our interpreter. I have a suspicion that our guide Virginie may have made herself scarce on purpose for this village tour as part of our immersion into French life.
After the village it was off to Oradour-Sur-Glane and to the memorial where on June 10, 1944 the Nazi’s murdered 642 men, women and children and then burned the town to the ground. The town has been left as it was on that day as a memorial and the new town was rebuilt next to it. I’ve never visited a concentration camp before, but I imagine I’d have the same feeling there as I had here. It was eerily silent. We only had about an hour to wander and I could have used much more. Some people on the tour; including my wife felt differently and didn’t want to hang around. In the cemetery you’ll find grave sites where all family members were buried together; Fathers, Mothers and children. And in the entrance to the town you walk through a tunnel with photographs of almost all the victims that died that day. All through France, you’ll find memorials from both World Wars and you get a real sense of what the French lived through in the first half of that century. It’s the one day of the trip that will stick with me.
We ended our day in Sarlat in the Dordogne region which will be our home for the next 3 days.
Day 6 is in the 'comments' section.