Commentary by Malana; Photos by Roland

Roland and I have spent a week in another village near Rodez in the Aveyron.  We are renting a gite in the home of a kind family with 5 teenage children. Although they are very polite and usually quiet — we are on the same hot water tank — so we need to be careful to get our shower in early in the day.

The weather wasn’t very good for the first few days but 3 days ago the sun came out and we decided to explore the village and surroundings. We roamed about the medieval core of the village.  Of course there is a beautiful church (built in the 13th century and remolded in the 14th and 15th centuries) and a number of stone houses and buildings.

The church was fortified during the 100 years war with England.  As not all villages had castles or other defenses — the church became the place for the villagers to hide if invaded.

This is a picture of the fortified church where the locals would take shelter if those pesky English Protestants invaded the village (there is even a well inside so people could have access to water if under siege).

Here is a slideshow of the village and the surrounding area.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

But before we walked around the village we visited the Resistance Monument about 1 km out of the village.  Roland wrote a blog detailing the history. But as part of the monument they included the names of all the victims of Nazi barbarism throughout Aveyron.  That including the names of Jewish children as young as 3 years old.  They also had a map showing the locations of battles, resistance hideouts as well as the location of Nazi raids on local Jews.  Many of the Jews in France were immigrants from eastern Europe or Germany who were trying to flee the Nazis in their own country but were unfortunately never able to escape.

We mentioned the history of Sainte Radegonde and the monument to a woman we met in Rodez and she told the story of her aunt who was a young school girl during the Nazi occupation.  Her aunt remembered vividly the sound of the Nazis’ goose stepping boots hitting the cobblestone streets and reverberating throughout the city. She also witnessed the Nazis coming into her class and taking 2 of her classmates away — they were never seen again.

Every hamlet, village, town, and city in France has, over its history, seen the ravages of war both in the fairly recent past and over the centuries.  It is certainly something that as Americans is both shocking and difficult to imagine but certainly real.