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Video duration: 5 min
80 years of Oradour-sur-Glane: the story of Roger Godfrin, the only child survivor of barbarism
On June 10, 1944, seven residents managed to escape the fury of the Waffen-SS in Oradour-sur-Glane. Among them, an 8-year-old child, Roger Godfrin, now missing. A few years ago, he recounted his escape and the trauma of having lost his loved ones.
(France 2)
On June 10, 1944, seven residents managed to escape the fury of the Waffen-SS in Oradour-sur-Glane. Among them, an 8-year-old child, Roger Godfrin, now missing. A few years ago, he recounted his escape and the trauma of having lost his loved ones.
A little boy in short pants, solemn and frozen. Only eight years old, in the middle of his village in ruins. Roger Godfrin was the only child survivor of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Haute-Vienne). On June 10, 1944, at 2 p.m., an SS column entered the town. All that will remain of the village are ruins and 643 tortured bodies, including 205 children. 48 years later, Roger Godfrin was still haunted by the tragedy. “This massacre, these flames, we cannot forget. I see everything that happened again, I think about it every day”he confided in 1992.
The SS had come to pick up the children from school. “His parents told him: if you see the Germans, you have to flee, we will all meet in the woods behind the cemetery”, says Benoit Sadry, president of the National Association of Families of Martyrs of Oradour-sur-Glane. Roger Godfrin then fled, encountering a shot man and a dog he called Bobby on his way. “I heard a machine gun burst, and nothing more. So, I looked up, and I saw a ball (…). It was my Bobby. They had killed him”, he remembers, still moved. He then said he fell into a coma and was found by a road worker.
The next day, he learned of the death of his parents, as well as his four brothers and sisters. Roger Godfrin then did everything to be happy. He married at age 20, and had two children, whom he asked to put his ashes in the ruined church of Oradour.
