No More Comforting Lies

Two decades. That’s what I celebrated on New Year’s Day. Twenty years since I boarded a plane in Denver to start a new life in Paris. So many things have come and gone during that time. Lessons. Loss. Lifetimes.

A few days after toasting that anniversary, I buttoned up my black suit over my very fancy Joe Strummer t-shirt and threw on my very classy black Converse All Stars. Then my husband and I attended a ceremony at the town hall here in Brighton where we became British citizens.

Not where I envisaged things going when I moved to France in 2006, but many things that are part of daily life were unimaginable twenty years ago. I’ve been visiting that point in time a lot recently. Temporal landmarks provoke reflection. A brief regression to who and where we were. It’s not nostalgia, exactly. Just a side effect of crossing a milestone.

I’ll be honest. I experienced severe growing pains during the first few years. I’m not talking about the obvious learning curves that come from studying a new language, settling into a new routine, or learning the streets and customs of a new country. Nah, none of that. I’m talking about the strain that comes from being severed. When you stop being a part of people’s daily lives, they think of you less. For everyone back home, I was one person who moved away while their world remained intact. For me, my world moved away. Relationships weakened. Some friendships withered and blew away altogether.

When you lose your world and enter a new one, it can be difficult to remember who you are. The environment that made you YOU is gone. So, who you are changes. You become another version of yourself.

Distance wasn’t the only factor. It didn’t take much time in France to start seeing everyone through the eyes of this altered identity. Including myself. I’d traveled before, sure, but that isn’t the same as making a life in another culture. It soon became apparent to me how insular Americans were. How ignorant I had been. I began to care about things that I’d never given much thought to before. What I once cared about seemed trivial. I’ve no doubt that while I’m already not an easy person to live with, I became insufferable when discussing certain topics. Like talking American politics with folks back home. I’d moved away, so even though I was still a voting citizen, I’d somehow rescinded my right to an opinion. The thing was, though, I now had a better view of how bullshit back home affected real human beings in other countries.

What punched me in the brain repeatedly, though, was the lessons in cruelty. This was something I thought I understood because I was just so goddamn smart. Yeah, well… smart ain’t got nothing to do with it.

During the years I lived in France, my husband and I took road trips and short vacations whenever we could. Sometimes to nearby places. Other times, a little further away. I’ve always loved meandering around historical sites no matter where I’m at. Back home in Colorado, I traipsed around some of the many ghost towns in the state, reading up on the people who’d lived there and why they’d gone away. I wandered through various visitor’s centers and gawped at Native American art, imagining who’d come before and what they’d endured. What their daily lives might’ve been like. But that was long ago. Ancient history.

I cruised around on motorcycles through the Black Hills of South Dakota and stood in front of Mount Rushmore, ticking another landmark off the list without deep consideration of what it all meant. Without looking at myself and what was going on in the world around me.

A few years after moving to France, during a stop in Berlin on a road trip, I stood in a cold, tiled room in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where human beings had once been the subject of horrific experiments and torture. I stared into the open ovens. Standing in a pit where mass executions had taken place by firing squad, I gazed up at the sky, imagining with horror how many strangers must have looked up at the same sky in their final moments. Beneath the silence and the years, the echoes of fear and death still send tremors through anyone willing to listen. We were shook for the rest of the day and didn’t sleep well that night. Eventually, though, the darkness and gloom of that visit dissipated. It was just a tourist visit, after all. That was long ago. Those terrible days were history.

We left Europe and settled in England in 2015, making the occasional visit to France. On one visit, my in-laws suggested a visit to Oradour-sur-Glane. I hadn’t heard of it, so my francophone family described it in a way my Colorado brain would understand: a ghost town. Only, “ghost town” isn’t heavy enough to capture what that village really is.

The people of Oradour managed to stay pretty chill during WWII. They hadn’t seen much action, and few Germans came through town. Until the 10th of June 1944. That day, a couple hundred SS creeps encircled the town and blocked off all the exits. They rounded up every man, woman, and child, including the sick and elderly. Citizens reported to the town center. It didn’t take long for everyone to realize that this wasn’t just a routine check. The SS creeps accused the villagers of resistance activities and hiding weapons. That hiding weapons thing… it’s a classic.

Long story short, the men were separated from the women and children. The men were lined up, and the Nazis opened fire. The women and children were forced into a church and locked inside. The church was set ablaze, and those who attempted to escape were shot. The village was burned to the ground. The details are much worse, but I’m not gonna get into them here. Really, though… you oughta take the time to read about it. In the end, 642 villagers were massacred and 7 survived in spite of their burns and bullet wounds.

Yeah, “ghost town” feels inadequate. Oradour is a horrific moment of sadism and terror frozen in time. Bicycles, cars, tools, and sewing machines remain where their owners left them that day. The walls and doorways of homes and businesses still stand, hollow skeletons occupied by visitors and phantoms. The ruins of bullets and fire that serve as a memorial maintained by the Ministry of Culture to remind people. An effort to prevent things like this from happening again.

I think about Oradour a lot. More than anyplace I visited in the States. More than the silent screams on the ancient faces in Pompeii. More than the psychic scars left from that concentration camp. More than the Battlefield at Culloden, which is one of the saddest beautiful places I’ve ever been to. Something about a village of people just going about their lives one day only to have some hateful shitbags come riding into town to slaughter them… it’s a horrific human cruelty I cannot wrap my head around. I mean, it was 1944. The war was as good as over, right? Why’d they do it?

Well, I’m glad you fucking asked. They did it for no goddamn reason whatsoever. Well, no reason that most of us could understand. They did it because they were losers. Because they’d been defeated and were forced to end their occupation, and fuck off back home to take their well-deserved L. On their way to fucking off, they did what Nazis do. They engaged in cruelty for cruelty’s sake. They descended upon a town of innocent civilians and unleashed their twisted barbarism on them, obtaining glee from malice. Because they were losers. Because ganging up on non-combatants under the pretext of a fabricated threat is classic loser behavior. Because gunning citizens down in the street while patting themselves on the back and then lying about what really happened is just the kind of thing pathetic shitbags do.

Because they had no respect or reverence for human lives, or for other’s right to exist and go about their day. And when that happens, the result is haunted streets of rust and ashes.

Or maybe Oradour sticks with me more than those other places because after walking those streets, I no longer held onto that comforting lie of being able to tell myself that this was just a tourist visit after all. That those terrible days are history.

I visit historical places because I’m curious and love to learn. Sometimes, though, the price of that curiosity is sitting with the grim, visceral understanding of the terrible things people are capable of doing to one another. I think of the scattered objects that lay rusting in Oradour, and knowing what brutality human beings are capable of overwhelms me. That’s when I need to put my phone down and retreat into a book or watch something like Lord of the Rings or Moulin Rouge for the 800th time.

Two decades. Back then, I thought we’d all keep progressing forward, but we’re rushing headlong into the past with more Oradours and fewer utopias on the horizon. This isn’t at all where I thought any of us would end up back in 2006, but a lot of things that are part of our daily lives seemed outside the realm of possibility twenty years ago. Maybe I should’ve known better, because losers and their capacity for cruelty never really go away. They’re a putrid infestation lurking in dark and rotten corners like a fetid fungus, waiting for an opportunity to spread. For a master to come along who’ll tell them comforting lies while throwing some meat at them to feed on. And their rot slithers among us until once again, they’re thrown back by the light.

“There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.”

-Ursula K. Le Guin