“I heard screams. Then, a gunshot. The bullet ricocheted off the chimney. I was deaf to it for a while, but I could understand Mom telling me, “Come home quickly.” We took refuge on the other side, in a field. What saved us was that dad had the idea of ??pushing back the shutters while running away. The Germans didn’t see us hiding behind a pile of wood. We remained lying on the ground, in the middle of the nettles. Eugenie Bernard was 18 when she saw and survived the massacre perpetrated by the Nazis.
It was August 25, 1944. General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division made a triumphant entry into the streets of Paris. The capital was finally liberated from the German yoke. History has remembered this date as a key moment. She has long forgotten that on the same day, 300 kilometers further south, in Touraine, the quiet existence of the inhabitants of Maille was upended by Nazi savagery.
What could have caused such an outburst of violence? On site, a claim was found nailed to a door: “This is the punishment of the terrorists and their assistants. The day before, a clash between guerrillas and soldiers had left one dead and one injured on the German side. “It was a period when the maquis was active, explains Romain Taillefait, director of the Maison du Souvenir in Maillé, which opened in February 2006. The attack the day before was not the first and is not enough to explain this murderous surge which, as the word indicates, is not thought out in anger but very calmly planned. According to the director, the clash the day before “is a pretext to restore more broadly an authority that has been undermined since the D-Day landings”.
In Oradour-sur-Glane, this martyr village of Haute-Vienne with 642 victims, the French state decided to leave the center of the village in ruins, as a “symbol of Nazi barbarism”. Not so in Touraine. It took until 2008 for a President of the Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, to finally visit the town of Indre-et-Loire. The Head of State then recognized that by “ignoring the tragedy of Maillé for so long, by remaining indifferent to the pain of the survivors, by allowing the memory of the victims to fade from its memory, France has committed a moral fault . In the middle of the crowd, Eugenie and Charlette, her sister who also survived, listened and heard.
