One Day in Oradour

There are some episodes in history that are difficult to read about and what happened in Oradour in June 1944 is one of them.  Almost the entire village population was massacred, the women and children burned together in the locked church.  Helen Watts has chosen to take the facts as known, and using some fictional characters and some based on amalgams of real people, has written a novel about these events.  On the cover is a photograph of the one child who survived, Roger Godfrin, who has written his own account of that day.  Helen Watts has chosen to use Roger’s story but under a different name.  She has also changed the name of the main perpetrator of the massacre, and given him a background which suggests overtly that his actions were as a result of his childhood.   A long piece at the end of the book, relating the actual facts of the massacre at Oradour, throws light on the way in which she has chosen to retell the story.

Writing a historical novel and using real people in the story together with fictitious characters often works very well, but in this case I felt it didn’t.  This is partly because the writing is not of great quality, but also because these events are part of our near history, and have been well documented in factual accounts.  There are very few fictional accounts of the Holocaust for example, Sophie’s Choice comes to mind, but in the main these truly awful events remain documented by accounts of those survivors or their relatives.

Whether this massacre should have been chosen as the subject of a novel for children is also a question to be raised.  The sheer horror of what went on in Oradour those June days is unimaginable and difficult to portray. There is no bibliography to lead anyone on to better factual accounts of this awful day, which is another omission by the author or publisher, and the use of Roger Godfrin’s photograph on the front cover  is a questionable decision.