Friendship

Haven't been able to take and upload any photos for a couple of days as I am running an intensive teacher training course in Strasbourg and have only just been equipped with a dongle which gives me internet access in the flat where I am staying.

This flat is owned by a 95% visually-impaired person and so there is not TV and, worse, no books. But if I knew Braille I could operate the washing machine as the instructions are embossed on the front panel.

On the wall is this photo; I guess 'freundschaft' is the equivalent of the French 'amitiés'= friendship. As Germany is just over the border and many people speak the Alsatian dialect which looks like German anyway and the streets have two names, it is to be hoped that hostilities don't break out again. The area of Alsace and Lorraine is ferociously French having suffered 3 German invasions since 1870.

That said, there is some sympathy for neo-Nazi groups and the people who were enrolled into the German army in WWII are called 'malgré nous (=despite ourselves) but I'm told that some people might not have been as reluctant as all that.

14 soldiers from Alsace were involved in the massacre at Ouradour-sur-Glane in 1944 and a subsequent trial caused an uproar in Alsace forcing the French parliament to pass an amnesty law for all malgré-nous on 19 February, and the Alsatians who had been convicted were released shortly afterwards. This, in turn, caused bitter protests in the Limousin region, the region in which Ouradour-sur-Glane is situated. If you go there, you will see the ruined village and the calcinated church into which 452 people were herded and burnt to death. A total of 642 inhabitants died within a matter of hours.