Thank god I’m too old for that,” snorted Ray Cousins of the Greeting Card Association when asked about whether New Dad is getting any Hallmark moments these days. If he is, it is only a second or two – a percentage of a percentage of the 25 million Father’s Day cards sold.My own perusal of cards revealed dad as still incredibly active for such an old-fashioned guy: he’s a huntin’, shootin’, fishin’, boxin’, footballin’ type who likes malt and lager and whose wife is a real nag (and often depicted as a horse). As they stumbled into the darkness and stench of their huts, they did not expect to enter again the world beyond the wire. But some of them knew that they must live against all the odds, because the most important thing in the world now was to make a new Europe in which this could never happen again. Bosnia only reminded Europeans of what Natzweiler had revealed.Standing there in the clean mountain air, watching French schoolchildren trudging up empty terraces where the huts once stood, it seemed important to remember not only the dead but the survivors.

They felt that they had become a sort of priesthood, possessing the terrible secret of what men could do to other men. Our confidence in the improving power of education, high culture or technical achievement is far more fragile. The human race, in its European species, suddenly revealed a capacity for cruelty and evil that none had expected. This discovery makes our view of life basically different from that of our grandparents. What died here, with all these men and women from so many countries, was the faith in automatic progress That is what now seems to matter most.

But now, more than 50 years on, it is not possible to understand a place like this in terms of patriotic martyrdom.It was not only French people who perished here, and the French dead may not even be the largest single group of victims. Neither, while it stood, was this concentration camp on French soil. It was built on what was then Reich territory, and its “trade routes” – the web of economic connections through which it supplied slave labour to factories, mines and construction firms – reached far eastwards into central Germany. Everywhere there are French flags and accounts of the martyrdom of the French Resistance.