them down to the valleys, the rugged gorges dropping vertiginously 1,800ft to darkness at noon and rushing water, and at the peacefully cultivated valleys with their villages and small towns seemingly untouched by time.
The tourist need never be troubled by the appalling history of the plateau, on which the locals seem – understandably – to have turned their backs. One could easily visit the sleepy village of Vassieux without seeing any sign indicating the way to the museum that tells the story of the total destruction of the village and massacre of its inhabitants in 1944. Inside, the modest display was the work of one man swimming against the tide, for the authorities preferred to ignore his documentation of a horrifying episode of military incompetence and political vacillation.
The son of poor Italian immigrants who was sent out to work as a shepherd at the age of 7 , Joseph la Picirella was determined to preserve the memory of the horrors he lived through and saw with his own eyes. Although now administered by the Département de la Drôme, as museums go, Picirella’s is not large, although the exhibited photographs, weapons and other memorabilia are an impressive personal collection.
On a typical midsummer day at the height of the tourist season only a handful of people wander round the crudely fashioned showcases. A German mother in her forties translates the captions – which are in French only – for her three blonde sons. Elderly French couples wander round silently, perhaps lost in their own memories. The men tend to concentrate on the weapons, especially those they recognise and possibly used in France’s conflicts after 1945. Some bored young children play tag between the showcases. At the reception desk, a member of staff who speaks reasonable German shares a joke with another visitor from Germany who has just been photographing the carcase of a DFS-230 assault glider displayed outside, in which Waffen-SS men brought death from the sky to this peaceful place on the morning of 21 July 1944.
In addition to the usual village cemetery, there is a military one just outside Vassieux. In precise rows of identically marked graves lie 192 people who died here in the summer of 1944. It is called Le Necropole de la Résistance and some headstones mark the graves of officers and soldiers of the FFI with their rank at time of death, as one would expect in a war cemetery. Two of these stones display, instead of the Christian cross, the crescent of Islam. The visitor who takes the trouble to scan every headstone will swiftly notice that one-third of the markers are simply designated ‘Unknown’ because the body buried beneath was too badly damaged by torture and/or explosions and/or fire to be identifiable, or even sexed, with the means available in 1944. Most surprising of all, in a military cemetery, is that one-third of the headstones bear female names.
Marie Blanc was a 91-year-old great-grandmother when she was killed on 14 July 1944. Jacqueline Blanc was 7 when she was killed on 21 July, the same day as her 4-year-old sister Danielle and 18-month-old brother Maurice. Suzanne Blanc was 20 when she died on 31 July, the same day as her sister Arlette, aged 12. The spread of dates tells its own story: this was no isolated air raid, no single skirmish that resulted in the deaths of defenceless civilians, but a sustained three-week campaign of terror and torture that began with bombing and strafing civilian targets on 14 July 1944 and escalated to sheer barbarity after the German gliders landed just outside the village limits one week later. The skeleton of one DFS-230 is still airborne just outside the cemetery, supported by a steel girder as mute evidence of what happened. Still in place is the single row of ten metal passenger seat frames, one behind the other, on which sat the killers of Jacqueline, Danielle and Maurice.
To begin the sequence of events that led to their deaths, it is necessary to turn the
The tourist need never be troubled by the appalling history of the plateau, on which the locals seem – understandably – to have turned their backs. One could easily visit the sleepy village of Vassieux without seeing any sign indicating the way to the museum that tells the story of the total destruction of the village and massacre of its inhabitants in 1944. Inside, the modest display was the work of one man swimming against the tide, for the authorities preferred to ignore his documentation of a horrifying episode of military incompetence and political vacillation.
The son of poor Italian immigrants who was sent out to work as a shepherd at the age of 7 , Joseph la Picirella was determined to preserve the memory of the horrors he lived through and saw with his own eyes. Although now administered by the Département de la Drôme, as museums go, Picirella’s is not large, although the exhibited photographs, weapons and other memorabilia are an impressive personal collection.
On a typical midsummer day at the height of the tourist season only a handful of people wander round the crudely fashioned showcases. A German mother in her forties translates the captions – which are in French only – for her three blonde sons. Elderly French couples wander round silently, perhaps lost in their own memories. The men tend to concentrate on the weapons, especially those they recognise and possibly used in France’s conflicts after 1945. Some bored young children play tag between the showcases. At the reception desk, a member of staff who speaks reasonable German shares a joke with another visitor from Germany who has just been photographing the carcase of a DFS-230 assault glider displayed outside, in which Waffen-SS men brought death from the sky to this peaceful place on the morning of 21 July 1944.
In addition to the usual village cemetery, there is a military one just outside Vassieux. In precise rows of identically marked graves lie 192 people who died here in the summer of 1944. It is called Le Necropole de la Résistance and some headstones mark the graves of officers and soldiers of the FFI with their rank at time of death, as one would expect in a war cemetery. Two of these stones display, instead of the Christian cross, the crescent of Islam. The visitor who takes the trouble to scan every headstone will swiftly notice that one-third of the markers are simply designated ‘Unknown’ because the body buried beneath was too badly damaged by torture and/or explosions and/or fire to be identifiable, or even sexed, with the means available in 1944. Most surprising of all, in a military cemetery, is that one-third of the headstones bear female names.
Marie Blanc was a 91-year-old great-grandmother when she was killed on 14 July 1944. Jacqueline Blanc was 7 when she was killed on 21 July, the same day as her 4-year-old sister Danielle and 18-month-old brother Maurice. Suzanne Blanc was 20 when she died on 31 July, the same day as her sister Arlette, aged 12. The spread of dates tells its own story: this was no isolated air raid, no single skirmish that resulted in the deaths of defenceless civilians, but a sustained three-week campaign of terror and torture that began with bombing and strafing civilian targets on 14 July 1944 and escalated to sheer barbarity after the German gliders landed just outside the village limits one week later. The skeleton of one DFS-230 is still airborne just outside the cemetery, supported by a steel girder as mute evidence of what happened. Still in place is the single row of ten metal passenger seat frames, one behind the other, on which sat the killers of Jacqueline, Danielle and Maurice.
To begin the sequence of events that led to their deaths, it is necessary to turn the
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