Emmanuel Macron decorated Tuesday, January 25 with the National Order of Merit Robert Hébras, 96, the last survivor of the massacre of 643 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane (Haute-Vienne) by the Nazis in 1944, warning against "
the forgetting of History
".
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"
You are the ultimate witness to this tragedy which almost left none,
" declared the Head of State during a brief ceremony in a communal hall in Oradour-sur-Glane in the presence of Robert Hébras. , relatives, residents and heads of associations, on the occasion of the second day of his tour in the rural world.
“A symbol of freedom”
“
You are a symbol of freedom, dignity and fraternity
”, he added, welcoming “
the tireless work of memory
” made by the man who witnessed for decades the massacre of June 10, 1944. “
Our national memory will not be extinguished because we will constantly rekindle the flame
, ”assured Emmanuel Macron. Because "
those who run the risk of oblivion commit us to a single path, the one that would make us take the risk of repeating this history
", he warned, without naming names, two and a half months from the presidential one.
On June 10, 1944, four days after D-Day, 643 inhabitants of Oradour, near Limoges, had been massacred by the SS Das Reich division which was joining the Normandy front in a bloody march. Robert Hébras, a 19-year-old mechanic, was one of the six survivors of the massacre after being machine-gunned and left for dead in a barn, from where he managed to escape despite the fire. He is the last survivor since the death of another survivor in 2016. On September 4, 2013, facing the broken altar of the church, Robert Hébras had been embraced by French Presidents François Hollande and German Joachim Gauck. A new symbolic gesture of Franco-German reconciliation after that of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, hand in hand in 1984 in Verdun.
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Emmanuel Macron, who has already come twice to Oradour in 2017, also gathered in front of the monument in memory of the victims in the cemetery.
He was expected in Berlin in the evening for a dinner with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Jean Castex will travel with the Ministers of the Interior and Culture to Auschwitz as part of the commemorations of the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.
He will be accompanied by French survivors, representatives of associations, religious leaders of the Jewish community as well as middle and high school students.