Christmas, flickering but indispensable light

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 10^th, 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.