Gordes is a gorgeous hill town in Provence. It's classified as one of the "most beautiful villages of France." The buildings are nestled into the rocks and the winding cobblestones streets echo the Middle Ages. The town was decimated by the Germans in World War II and many of the buildings were destroyed. After the war, artists began to inhabit it. Marc Chagall was a notable. I read that at the end of the 1960s, painter Victor Vasarely bought the hilltop 16th century castle for one franc and restored it, launching a rebirth of the town. In the last decade or so, real estate has been snapped up by well-to-do Parisians and foreigners. It has been fixed up so that every house, stone wall and boutique is tastefully gorgeous.
We approached the town on the only road in and pulled off onto the wide shoulder for a vista of the town. I noticed an information plaque perched on the wall with a photo of the town’s WWII wreckage. It explained the bombing on August 22, 1944. Challenging myself in French I read the brief text. A bit shocked by the message, I continued on and read the English translation to make sure that I understood correctly what I was reading.
Same message in French. Four sentences summarized the town’s fate at the hands of the Germans. The thing I couldn’t believe was that the author used the final sentence to take a cheap shot at one of the victims. She or he (I’m guessing that the author was a he -- taking a cheap shot of my own) wrote: “Most of the inhabitants fled, those who remained protected themselves as well as they could, but a careless man, Francois Brunei, was shot at his window by a German marksman waiting in ambush.”
Jeepers! The poor guy Brunei was slaughtered by a German soldier, but the author blames the victim.
Really? In so few words allotted to describe the destruction of the village, that’s what the author decided was most important for the world to know?
How many people worked on that plaque and let it slip through? What did that poor guy Francois Brunei do besides be stupid to look out the window during a war?