Christmas no
longer belongs to Christians only. It is now apparently appropriated by the
whole world, with a few adaptations. I have heard that Santa Claus now rides into
N’Djamena on a camel. It is rather a good thinga that a moment of the year be
dedicated to family, gifts and, in a certain way, human concern. Even in
its merchandised and materialistic version, Christmas remains an opportunity for
solidarity with the poorest, a time when a hope for peace and rebirth is
expressed, be it symbolically during a brief moment of magic, before a mean and
brutal daily life reclaims its rights.
However, by losing
its Christian character Christmas loses a lot of its tragic strength. As the minority
who attends the Nativity services well knows, the Saviour’s birth is marked by
an absolutely horrible bloodshed, the innocents’ massacre. Fearing the birth of
a potential competitor, the king of Judea wants to crush in the earliest stage
a possible rebellion and orders all the newborns of Bethlehem killed; Jesus’ family
narrowly escapes fate only thanks to Joseph’s premonitory dream. Hence,
according to the holy scritpures themselves, humanity’s saviour’s arrival into
the world is marked by what would today be considered a crime against humanity. What
this tells us about human nature is unbearably black, even more so when one realizes
that History is riddled with such episodes, some of them fairly recent.
One of those was commited in a now sadly familiar village,
in the Limousin province, Oradour-sur-Glane. It was on June 10th, 1944.
A company from the “Der Führer” regiment, belonging to the SS “Das Reich”
division, surrounded the village, rounded up the population, gunned down the
men through the doors of the barns where they were detained, and set fire to
the church, where the women and children had been locked up. From the six hundred
fourty-six victims of this methodical extermination, only six miraculously
survived. Tragedy has it that 140,000 young French citizens had been forcibly conscripted
into the German Army because they were considered to be “racially German” on
the basis that their native dialect was Germanic, and that 29 from the 150 SS
soldiers present in Oradour that day were from Alsace, actually 28 forcibly
recruited and one volunteer. No matter that most of those soldiers were under
the age of majority, no matter that those posted on the outskirts of the
village had let fugitives go and prevented other from springing into the lions’
den, no matter that only threat and blackmail had coerced those young people
into the German ranks, the shock was so huge that the survivors’ hate crystallised
on all those associated with the massacre whoever they were. It was
unacceptable to them that the crime which had left them widowed, orphaned and
destitute would not be tried, and one can only understand their feelings. The
forcibly recruited were however already themselves recognised as the victims of
a crime against humanity. A special law was therefore passed, with retroactive
effect, introducing the notion of “collective responsibility”, in order to pave
the way for what became the pathetic Bordeaux trial in 1953, without the
presence of any of the officers responsible for the massacre. Thirteen
Alsacians and seven Germans were heavily condemned. However, in view of the potent
wave of emotion and protest coming from Alsace, with massive demonstrations
against this one-sided view of History,
the French government backed up and granted a general amnesty, which in turn
enflamed the Limousin region. Each side felt badly treated and victimised and retreated
into their positions. It was from then on impossible even to talk about the
issue with any of the sides without triggering serious incidents.
Yet I realized during a recent visit in Alsace that the
situation had evolved over the last
fifteen years. Contacts were established between the martyrized village
and Alsace in spite of the ever-present grief of the families. Charles Gantzer,
the president of an association of former « malgré nous » succeeded
after several failures to meet with the mayor of Oradour, Raymond Frugier, who
had himself made several unsuccessful attempts to reach out to the mayor of
Strasbourg. At Easter 1998 a group of young people from Alsace was received by
families in Oradour in spite of a diffuse hostility. It liberated the speech on
both sides, there were discussions until late into the night, there was
listening to each other. Soon afterwards the mayor of Strasbourg became
personally involved – he was the son of a “malgré nous” – and became a personal
friend of Raymond Frugier ; many political figures from Alsace also came to
Oradour, among those were Adrien Zeller, the regional president, and Philippe Richert,
president of the departmental assembly or conseil général. In 2000, a group
from Bayern was invited in Oradour – Raymond Frugier had had to threaten to
resign to see this particular project through, even if everyone approved of it
afterwards. A young German became indisposed during the tour of the remains of
the martyrized village – it turned out that he had only recently heard that his
grandfather had been a SS.
Joint commemorations are now the rule. Mutual understanding
has been achieved. On one side Oradour’s six hundred thirty-six innocent
victims and a destroyed village. On the other side the “malgré nous”: one
hundred and thirty thousand forcibly recruited, forty thousands dead or missing,
including those who died in the Russian prisoners camps. One cannot but marvel
at the human capacity to overcome such tests.
So life does prevail over death in spite of its extreme destructive
power. Folly to the world, the Christian message maintains exactly that, no
matter how extreme those destructive powers can be. Hope is as radical as
abomination was. That there was a way out of the spiral of resentment and hate in
the complicated story of Oradour goes to show that everything is possible in such
matters. Why not then achieve the same thing tomorrow, with the same tools of
listening and dialogue, between France and Algeria, Israel and Palestine, etc. provided that the power of hate and violence is not underestimated, and
that no illusions are kept about the difficulty of the process. Christmas’
miracle takes place in the human heart, with difficulty, when a person summons
all their courage and takes costly decisions, provided they accept to renounce
to a least a part of themselves and of their demands.
Christmas is no magic. It is on the contrary at the same
time costly, rough and very real. Christmas is an uncertain, flickering light, which
relies on simple humans, sometimes terrified, sometimes crushed by their past,
but is is nonetheless a light that shows the way forward for the whole of
humankind, Christians and non-Christians alike.
