Ossuary containing bone fragments of the victims
This is one of two glass roofed ossuaries located on either side of the main memorial in Oradour-sur-Glane cemetery (this one is to the left of view of the memorial). In the ossuary are small bones and bone fragments of some of the victims that have survived the fires. The collection was made from various execution sites, the bits did not all come from the same place. This (to Anglo-Saxon eyes) slightly macabre practice of displaying the bones of the dead in a public manner is quite common in France, as at for example, the W.W.I. battlefield of Verdun, where the remains of over 120,000 partial skeletons are visible through ground-level windows in the main memorial on the battlefield.
© Michael Williams December 2006