The Warrior Next Door Podcast
The Warrior Next Door Podcast
The D-Day Liberation House Revisited
This is a companion episode to the original series (Season 3 Episodes 105-106) which was the story of the Maison de la Liberation or the Liberation House; a house in Saint Laurent sur mer on Omaha beach which claims to have been the first house liberated on D-Day. In this episode we revisit the story of the Liberation House from the perspective of a person whose family was deeply connected to the house. But you will soon find out that she does NOT agree with the story as it was related to us in the original series. Hear her issues with the story of the Liberation House as Tony and Ryan put on their forensic hats and try to peer thru history to discern the truth.
Okay, Warrior Next Door listeners, we've got kind of an interesting episode. Kind of a Perry Mason sort of whodunit thing. And it has to do with the only series that we've run that was not about a human being. It was about a house. And we did this in season three. So, you know, this is season five, two seasons ago. And it was about a house called the Maison de Liberation House, which was off of Omaha Beach. In the town of St. Laurent-sur-Mer, right? in this town of St. Sermour. I'm going to suck at this. I sucked at this when we recorded the first ever. St. Laurent Sermour. St. Laurent Sermour. Thank you. There were members of the resistance who, prior to D-Day, were collecting intel. On June 6th, on D-Day, they were rounded up and sent to the Khan prison, 87 of them, And were summarily executed six at a time. But there was one from this town who survived. His name is Charles Ollard. And Charles Ollard and his brother Lucian worked in the post office with the owner of, at this time, 1944, the owner of the Maison de Liberation house was André Perret. And André Perret took Charles, who had escaped... who had escaped from the Gestapo, from the Khan prison massacre, and gave him cover, gave him shelter, protected him. And then when the Allies landed, Charles ended up in a boat offshore, being interrogated by the Allies for various things that people felt like had to do with intel that he had. It all sounds above board, but the people within the town were always suspicious of Charles as a potential traitor. You know, why didn't he die? Why did their family members, why were they rounded up and they got killed and Charles survived? So, for decades, Charles Olard and his family had this kind of scarlet letter on them. Well, recently, his great-nephew, Sebastian Olard, purchased the house from a descendant from Andre Perret. Andre Perret was was the owner of the Maison de Liberation House. It was passed down to his son Bernard. Bernard sold it to Charles Olard's great-nephew. And now what Sebastian does and what he's been doing is two things. One, he has claimed, and we shared this evidence in our episode about exonerating his great-uncle Charles. And he was exonerated. There were articles that were written. There were certain elements of documents that were made available, kind of like a Freedom of Information Act thing, that suggested, including the organization whose job it is to memorialize the French resistance, the Alliance, or the Alliance, they all exonerated Charles Allard. And Sebastian now... owns this house and he gives tours of it. And we had a chance to go on a tour of this house and share the story that we just shared with you about the Maison Deliberation House, about its role as a loci for the French resistance, about what his great uncle was doing as a postman collecting intel, and also about, he mentions, the issues that the family had after the war. So in that two-part series, we leave with basically... The Olard family, or Charles, being exonerated, and Sebastian memorializing the house and his family's legacy, and the legacy the family's owned it before. Well, we said at the end of our episode, if someone disagreed... with anything that we said or how we conveyed it remember i had a lot of french sources i was doing google foo and google translate to get all this information if anyone has an issue with what we shared please share it with us well guess what happened warrior next door listeners we've got ourselves a controversy ryan what do we have
SPEAKER_01:so um not only is it uh uh Someone who disagrees, but someone who is directly related to Andre Poirot. It's Miss Nadine Poirot. And so just to kind of take you back a bit. So, you know, we received an email on March 16th of this year that was addressed to Tony and I. She says, I'm the granddaughter of Mr. Andre Poirot, who lived in St. Lawrence, Samaria on June the 6th, 1944 in Normandy. I saw on your YouTube your visit to the Maison de Liberation in June of 2022, and I listened to both of the podcasts that were published on the website. And she said, you should know that we are in conflict with Mr. Olard, the owner of the house. He doesn't have the permission of the Poirot family, and in particular, my father, the only survivor of the time, to tell the story of my great-grandmother and grandparents and the Liberation House, which she says he invented. By the way, you've been told a lot of nonsense because my grandfather wasn't a member of the resistance. He was just a postman from Colville Surmare. Besides, my grandfather did not appreciate Charles O'Lard. Mr. Sebastian O'Lard is not a historian. He is a manipulator who has been deceiving people for years with the help of his association, Le Fleurs de la Resistance. I can't say that. Le Fleurs de la Resistance. Has he shown you any documents, any historical evidence? Have you checked them? You should also know that his great uncle, Charles O'Leard, was neither a member of the resistance nor a sympathizer. There's no historical proof, but rather a collaborator, according to village elders. He didn't escape. And he didn't go into hiding until D-Day, protected by the Poirot family. He was not part of the OSS. And as for Captain Guattari's commando, they landed between June 19th and June 22nd, not on D-Day. As for the American paratrooper that was found dead behind the house, he was shaving. He wasn't without clothes. Nobody knows who he was or what regiment he belonged to. You're interpreting fallacious facts and come to even more fanciful conclusions. You cannot be So we're being chewed out here. I also recommend reading two websites where the historical truth is reestablished. I would therefore ask you to take the necessary steps to refute the video and the two podcasts or to simply delete them. Yours faithfully, Mrs. Nadine Praure, who is a teacher and a historian for the area. Okay. So at this time, Tony and I are like, wow. Okay. We asked for feedback and we got it. And we got it from someone very close. to the original story so it makes total sense and she has you know a lot of information here so i asked her i wrote her back you know i said absolutely tony and i want to make sure we do this story justice we want to do it right um rather than pulling the episodes down could we just could we have you on the podcast
SPEAKER_00:exactly yep
SPEAKER_01:to to talk to you about it well she said i don't I don't, I, that's not something that I do. Um, and so I would rather we, you know, we can do this through email and we can translate it easier that way and stuff. And I'm like, that's great. Cause it gives me something to read from rather than trying to interpret through the language barriers and stuff. So I asked her to please, um, provide a summary of her argument and their misgivings that they have with Mr. Willard and the story in general. So she wrote back to me with about a four-page letter here. So we'll go through this because we want to give equal time here to the Poirot family. And in the end, this is a very passionate topic over there. I remember when we were doing research for the original podcast, there were websites where people were posting comments and there was a heated argument going on in the comments. For all I know, it may have been the Poirot family that was involved in some of the comments there. But there's definitely some misgivings that are being had. Anyway.
SPEAKER_00:Well, just really quick, Ryan. Yeah. So we went to this house as part of a tour stop when Ryan and I traveled with Bill Parker. Yes, good point. for the 78th anniversary of D-Day. We had no idea about the history of this house. This was something that was part of an itinerary that was put together for Bill and the other veterans. They were honored at this house. This house, when we went into it, it was so small that Ryan and I did rock, paper, scissors, and I won, and I got to go inside and record this, and Ryan and Aaron had deep REM sleep during a rainstorm in their car. I was still jet lagged. They were out. They were gone. I was so jealous. Anyway, I go in there. In the house are like newspaper articles and pictures of like this OSS officer, Gillard and all that. And so it felt very much to me like it was well-researched. And Ryan's right. I'm finding articles. And the article, by the way, where the comment section got so heated was about Charles O'Lard. his great nephew, Sebastian, finding the documents that showed that Charles O'Lard was not a traitor. And here's an interesting piece of the argument. So he was in the prison. He gets released from the prison. People think, well, they must have released you because you're a traitor. Otherwise, they would have killed you. The counter-argument to that in this article was, Why would the Germans release somebody and think they'd be effective at all when they know they're going to be suspected of some sort of subterfuge if they're released? It seems contrary to what you do. Releasing this person actually compromises what the Germans are trying to do. So what I'm trying to say is, I know she's upset at what's going on, and we're about to lay out her case, right? But when Ryan and I had a chance to listen to the video and what Sebastian had, it seemed completely reasonable to us. But like so many things in history, it can be subjective, and it should always be scrutinized under a new lens when additional data become available. So Ryan, take it away. What is her grievance?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. So here's the email that she wrote back with her summary of things. She says, It's a collection of testimonies produced by Mr. Well, I'm not sure who it is. A teacher and his pupils on the encounters between the Normans and the Americans in June of 1944 on the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landing is when the testimony came. Press articles were published for the event. My uncle, Bernard, regularly recounted the events of the morning of June 6th in the newspapers and on television, particularly on the anniversaries of the landings. In 2000, Sebastian O'Lard bought the house. My uncle had owned it for two years to make vacation rentals. It belonged to my great aunt, who was the owner of the house from 1944 to 1944, 45, all the way to 1998. In 2004, a book on the history of St. Lawrence-sur-Mer was written, and she provides the history of St. Lawrence-sur-Mer, Histoire du Nouveau Village, which is my best French. This is a collaborative work in which local residents were invited to participate. My uncle, who was 10 years old at the time in 1944, helped by my father, who was 7 years old in 1944, recounted their experiences of June 6, 1944, and I lent some documents, such as family photos. In 2007, she's going through a timeline here, Sebastian Olar discovered the book, which was three years after the fact. In 2009, he created La Maison de la Liberation. My uncle warns me, I don't see anything wrong with it, even if the title is Maison de la Liberation, if it disturbs me. After all, what happened on June 6, 1944? They were liberated. On the morning of June 6th at around 9 a.m., my great grandmother spotted soldiers in a field behind the house wearing uniforms that were different from those of Germans. She realized that they were English, and she warned my grandfather that they're English. The soldiers arrived in the yard and pointed their guns at them, thinking that they are Germans disguised as civilians. Indeed, the allies thought the French civilians had fled the town. My grandfather showed them their identity cards. The Americans did not want to know, but one of the soldiers spoke a little French, maybe from Quebec, and checked the IDs. They understood their mistake. And just then a bomb fell on my great grandmother's house and they all took cover. Shots rang out and the Americans asked them to stay in their house. A bullet passed through the door, grazes the head of one of my other uncles and lodges in the kitchen wall. When Calm returned at around 2 p.m., the Americans came to get them, my great-grandmother, my grandparents, and her four children, and regrouped them a little further on in a house with around 50 other people. In the evening, they were transferred to another house with another– around another– around 20 other inhabitants where they stayed for four days until the Americans liberated the village. There were snipers everywhere. Sebastian Olard can't say that the house was the first to be liberated since they did not return free until June 9th or 10th. On June 7th, my grandfather returned to his house to gather food accompanied by American soldiers. Behind my great-grandmother's house, under the walnut tree, they discovered a dead American soldier. He was shaving. A parachute was on the nearby chicken coop. Mr. Sebastian Olard concluded, without any knowing or proof, that it was a paratrooper from the 101st Airborne. In 2012, he erected a monument in the field, which caused a scandal, particularly among the French and foreign associations. And under pressure, he then modified it. Well, time
SPEAKER_00:out, Ryan. I want to ask a few questions. So earlier, it sounded like Bernard Ollard, a descendant of Andre– I'm sorry, Bernard Perret– A descendant of Andre Perret, and obviously the author of this, it sounded like when he sold the house to Sebastian and he called it the Mason Deliberation House, it sounded like you were saying at that time they were kind of like, eh, it's okay. They weren't too upset about it initially.
SPEAKER_01:He was like, well, I can see, I mean, you could maim at that because after all, what was June 6, 1944? It was liberation. Exactly. And maybe this guy's just trying to make this the focal point for this town forever. talking about a home that was liberated.
SPEAKER_00:So if I'm hearing what she's writing correctly, the first real grievance she has in a narrative she shared with us is when he started to sensationalize the story about the dead American GI in the backyard, about misrepresenting it and putting a plaque up. Is that correct? So up until that point, that's 2012 that he did that. Is that correct? Correct. Yes. So up in 2012, they're like, okay, bought the house. It's a B and B, you know, he's bringing people in to tell stories about it. They're generally okay. But it sounds like this is when they start getting angry. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_01:Right. And he makes the leap, uh, the interpretation that it's 101st airborne guy, but there's no proof of that. Yeah. So, you know, know i'm just going to say this um when we were over there in normandy in 2022 um the 101st airborne rock stars yeah over there and it was a uh and i think largely because of band of brothers um but perhaps this that the fact perhaps this being a 101st airborne guy is how you could draw people
SPEAKER_00:to this location Totally. And it sounds like, so I think what I'm hearing is that they're okay with the idea that, look, tourists are going to come to the town and they're going to want to see this, but they just felt like this was just a bit too egregious. They're starting to be
SPEAKER_01:give them an inch, take a mile sort of things happening. So
SPEAKER_00:I just wanted to stop you there because it's like, I'm listening. It's like, okay, it's not like they're okay until this point, but please continue.
SPEAKER_01:So on June the 9th, Okay. First of all, she says, nevertheless, there is no historical evidence that members of the 101st Airborne jumped or landed in Omaha. They were over in Utah. Now, we all know that they were scattered.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. But there was nonetheless a parachute in a tree. So some paratrooper landed there. Yeah. Could it have been 82nd? Could it have been 101st? You know, maybe it was a Canadian. Who
SPEAKER_00:knows? Who knows? Right.
SPEAKER_01:But she said it was a dead American soldier. Maybe the parachute was just in the tree and landed by somebody else. And the dead American soldier wasn't a paratrooper, but just a dead American soldier. You know,
SPEAKER_00:and for our audience, if you listen to the original. episodes, we unpack the dead American soldier more. They're on a mission to try to identify this individual. They're trying to get dog tags and things like that. So this is a big deal. It's a big part of the story. Please
SPEAKER_01:continue. On June the 9th of 1944, my grandmother returned to gather food from the house also. In her garden, in a row of artichokes, she discovered a dead German soldier, perhaps a sniper. This is not an extraordinary story. Almost every family has known and recounted such events, which can be described in anecdotes. When Sebastian Olard rents out the vacation rental or Geet, he recalls this story and always indicates this as the liberation house in the rental advertisements. So he's using my family's history to rent it out. So there's a commercial interest at stake here. In 2011, he created the association Le Fleurs de la Résistance. copied from...
SPEAKER_00:Time out, time out. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is a huge piece of information. Are you telling me that he created this organization? In 2011. Okay, because in the article that exonerates Charles, it is written in such a way, and maybe it's just a translation from French to English, that this is a storied organization that whose sole job is to celebrate and memorialize members of the French resistance. They made it sound like it was, like this organization had been around since like 1944, but you're telling me this was created by Sebastian. It's a relatively new organization.
SPEAKER_01:That's what the letter says. That's
SPEAKER_00:what the
SPEAKER_01:email says.
SPEAKER_00:Because the letter, the research from this organization is what exonerated Charles And now I'm learning that it's actually run by Sebastian, his great nephew.
SPEAKER_01:That's what it states here. So let me finish the paragraph here. So again, in 2011, he created the association Le Fleurs de la Resistance, copied from Le Fleurs de la Memoire, whose purpose is to flower the graves of Christians. resistance fighters. In 2014, he amended the association's articles of association to add physical and financial assistance for the restoration of historical and memorial sites in order to maintain and perpetuate the sites. In other words, the Maison de Liberation. Can you see the trick? It gives it the title of a historic site, even though the Ministry of Culture has not granted it in this particular legal status. So it sounds like there's some stuff going on here. There's an organization that's dedicated to flowering the graves of resistance fighters. But his is, let me see here, the purpose of the flower of the graves of resistance fighters in 2014, he amended it to be able to add physical and financial assistance for the restoration of the historical and memorial sites. So it sounds like there's then becoming the ability to try to get money for geats or memorial
SPEAKER_00:sites such as this. And not just money, but credit, right? Street credit. Now, I'm not saying that Sebastian is wrong, because both sides could have skewed views of what the other side's doing, right? But I will say this. The most important piece of evidence for... exonerating Charles came from an article that quoted this organization, this Le Fleur organization, as some sort of historic organization that did research on this and said, look, Charles didn't do anything wrong. So it does feel a little... Circular to me.
SPEAKER_01:Self-fulfilling prophecy sort of thing,
SPEAKER_00:right? for us and the veterans and the families of the veterans who were English to understand him. So Pascal was interpreting. They did talk about the families leaving the house and going to a barn and living there for four days. So a lot of this is jiving until you get to two things. One, the GI in the back, in the back of the house, and then this organization that exonerated him. And one other element. The other piece of information that led me to believe that Charles was fully exonerated was a story that was spoken to me through Sebastian, through Pascal to me about Macron. And I don't remember which date, 2009, 2012. I don't remember. Visiting the area because it was a D-Day celebration and producing papers That were classified that showed Charles's role in the resistance and that he was not a traitor. The problem with that is it was hearsay. And when I went online to find that, which you think would be published somewhere, I mean, I found this obscure article about this other organization. I couldn't find it. I couldn't validate that.
SPEAKER_01:Really? Really? Yeah. Wow. Well, so things are starting to kind of, I mean, at this point, if you've got a column you're keeping track of, of, you know, is Sebastian correct? Is Ms. Poray correct? You know, the columns are starting to, you're starting to get some things here. And in the end, you know, you know, we, we have to trust, you know, what everyone's saying at this point, because obviously the, the, The hard evidence is very difficult to come by.
SPEAKER_00:Well, does she have any more evidence in this thing or is that it?
SPEAKER_01:So we'll keep moving on here. Okay. I wasn't sure. In June 2014, I visited the house of my father, which was an open house with Mr. Olard's absence at the time. We discovered panels, photos, some taken from the book written in 2004. I write to him a few days later. I remind him that he has no right to use private archives, hers, under intellectual property law. We also take exception to the use and exploit True. True. True. or so-called resistance fighter. According to village elders, Charles Olard was a collaborator. The rumor was born of history. Charles Olard was arrested on May the 5th of 1944 because his neighbors had been denounced as members of the resistance. On May the 12th, he was released. The sources prove it. The report states that in the absence of evidence, he cannot be charged with espionage. So contrary to what Sebastian Allard says, his great uncle wasn't tortured, didn't escape, and didn't hide until he landed at his workplace, which was the post office, with the help of my grandparents, a recent version of which I discovered on our podcast. So she hadn't even heard about this until she listened to our podcast. And we want to thank her for listening, by the way. Please continue. Until his death in 1990, he never spoke of anything. Rumors circulated about him that he had denounced the resistance fighters in exchange for saving his life, which he never denied. He explained his resistance activities to his grand nephew, but asked him not to say anything until his death in 1990. Strange to have waited until the purchase of the Mason deliberation to talk about it only in 2014. Why and why him? Charles O'Lard had six children and eight grandchildren. So why only Sebastian? But over the years to rehabilitate his uncle, Sebastian has linked his great uncle to every historical event that took place in St. Lawrence, Samaria. He keeps an eye on social networks and forums. And whenever someone does research or brings up a fact, he systematically links his uncle to it. For example, a commando landed and it was his great uncle who received the commando. He also took the opportunity to place a new plaque in the house's courtyard, except that the sources proved that Captain Guattari and his men landed between June 19th and 22, June 22nd, between Grand Camp and St. Lawrence-sur-Mer. On the morning of June 6th, Charles O'Lard was debriefed on an American ship because his great uncle was a member of the American Secret Service. Exclamation point on that, which is she's saying it's rather hard to believe. In the middle of the fighting, why would they bring someone aboard a ship on June the 6th? While the Americans asked the inhabitants to go to shelters. In other words, they were asking inhabitants to go to shelters that time while they bring one guy out to a ship. While the Germans were fighting the Americans on the beach until 1.45 p.m., they bring a guy out to the ship. On the morning of June the 6th, he was at home in the hamlet of Foss. Talis in Vierville-sur-Mer, not at the post office in St. Laurent-sur-Mer. His son often tells the story, a German soldier hid in their house for a while. He left again. An American soldier arrived, mistook Charles O'Lard for a soldier because he saw that he was wearing a letter carrier's uniform. He explained that he was French, and a few minutes later, the American took the German prisoner. Can I pause this for a second? Yeah, yeah. There's a lot to unpack here.
SPEAKER_00:You just said a bunch of stuff, so let's unpack a little bit. So yeah, if the listeners haven't listened to that two-part series on the house, Guattari was an OSS officer who apparently– his job was to link up with the French resistance and make sure that they were safe, make sure they weren't captured, and also to get them debriefed, to get any last bit of intel they could out of them. And so Guattari's son was in the Maison Deliberation House when I was there. Oh, I remember that. His son was there. I remember that. And his son, who couldn't speak English, well, you see the French, a lot of them speak English, they just won't speak English if it's not good enough. So he had a translator. And the translator, basically, what Guattari's son, I think he was named after his dad, was thanking the vets for everything that they did, and he was there with Sebastian. And they did mention, and it's mentioned in the podcast from season three, that Charles Olard was taken to a ship. I didn't know if it was a secret service. I thought it was some other OSS or some other clandestine organization. I remember when I heard that the first time that I thought it was a little... A little interesting, but I didn't judge. I don't know. And it was said in the house that that makes Charles Olard the only French citizen on D-Day who left the continent and was on an allied craft. And so they were very proud of that. But it sounds like what Miss Perret is saying is that didn't happen. And that he was in a house, correct? He was somewhere else?
SPEAKER_01:That's what she's saying, yeah. That he was in a home of another person in the town. And a German soldier came in. Well, actually, an American came in, thought he was a German, and so on. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it's hard to know. And honestly, we're just coming in to know this story. We don't have decades of family histories involved here, you know? So I have to be careful and everything, but you know, it's, it's just, that's to, to make that story up of this guy going out and having that to boast about, you know, that it's the only French citizen to leave the continent and go out on American ship. And how, I mean, where would that come from? Where would that, that story come from? You know, unless it's, I mean, it's pretty extraordinary if true, and rightfully so, to be able to have bragging rights about that. But we have no record of that that we've found, of that being the case. No one's ever heard of that. Now, I'm not saying I've done research looking for it either. But anyway,
SPEAKER_00:it's– I don't know what he knew. His dad was in the OSS. That was in there, his story. And I'm sure he was in there honoring his dad, and there was some link to that house. But I just don't know what– I mean, he sat there the whole time when Sebastian was sharing the story, but I just don't know how much he knows. But it is interesting. Please continue, Ryan.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, okay. So let's see here. Okay. She says that, in fact, he– okay, so let's see. Sebastian cross-references testimonies. Okay. and certain documents and draws personal conclusions from them or claims that he alone knows, questioning the work of historians and virulently on social networks. So he's very prolific on that. In fact, he only presents a few documents, and it's only those that suit his version of the story. Over the years, versions evolve, but as soon as someone accuses him or asks him for proof or starts asking questions or clarifications, he takes exception and he shuts the door on them. In 2017, he organized a ceremony to reel Okay, well, we'll stop right there. Because in
SPEAKER_00:the article that we shared with our audience, that was specifically the– The document I was telling you that this group found from 1945, which is right after the war, that exonerated Charles, what Ms. Poirot is saying is that they can't find that?
SPEAKER_01:There's no trace. They've checked the archives, and there's no trace of that decision. So all that discussion we had previously about the Le Fleurs de la Resistance, that's not this organization. We were thinking
SPEAKER_00:– I think you were thinking– Oh, I understand. And brought that letter from the archive as the example, actually the thing, the only thing in the article that exonerated Charles Olard. So now we're unpacking the layers. So we have this group that Sebastian started or runs that memorializes these French resistance fighters. They apparently– go into this archive where they're able to find this article that exonerates him they meet with the press they have a celebration they feature that article and now that story's being challenged by miss poor ray that is
SPEAKER_01:interesting she's saying that there's no there's no proof in the archives that that decision was made in 1945 clearing
SPEAKER_00:all art All right. So that 1945 one was the one that was in the article. All right. Please continue.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. In recent years, he has systematically associated both my family with his own. My grandfather was a letter carrier in Colville, Sermair. They only met at the post office. He wasn't a member of the resistance or even a sympathizer. He didn't like his colleague, Charles. In recent years, he has systematically associated my family with his own. Wait a second. Never mind. Oh, I just read that. Finally, since its creation in 2011, the Association Les Fleurs de la Resistance has had many members, vice presidents, treasurers, secretaries change every two to three years. Indeed, when people discover the truth that they've been manipulated or they discover the true personality of Mr. Allard, who becomes very nasty in words, then they resign. When we posted articles on Gilles Badoufoul's websites, people called to thank us. And thanks to us, their eyes have been opened. I sincerely hope that they'll do the same for you. Incidentally, I'd be grateful if you could give me the names of the people who accompanied your group and the veterans who organized the visit. So I'll just say this about the visit. We had just been that day on the beach for the first time with Bill and Jack Hamlin and Alan Chatwin on the beach at Normandy, underneath the monument there. It was a cold, rainy day, windy day. We get back in our vehicles and Peter Plank, who's the leader of our group, who organizes these trips every year, says, we're going to go up to this Mason deliberation. And I said, oh, what's this about? He goes, I don't know. He goes, I've never been to this house. They just approached me to come do this right now. So it's a kind of an ad hoc stop. Okay. And that's how the whole thing happened. I don't know if Peter has gone back since then or perhaps not. learned anything more about it. I've reached out to Peter to find out if he knows anything more about it, and I haven't been able to get in touch with him. So that's the story. That's the argument. I don't know that... One of the things I'm concerned about is we've got he said, she said, so to speak, going on here, and this could turn into... a little bit of a pissing match going back and forth on this, and we're never going to have real proof of what actually has happened. Well,
SPEAKER_00:there is one thing. There is one piece of evidence that if produced would end the most important part of this feud, and that would be that that letter from 1945 that's referenced in the news article that exonerates Charles, that mentions him specifically by name as being a reliable asset for the French resistance. If that could be produced, then everything else just falls under the whole thing of, hey, we've got this place, it's got some history, we wanna have some tourism here. I don't really have an issue with that. But if that could be produced, that would be a big deal.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And understandably, if you're the Poirot family and you believe that Charles O'Lard was a collaborator and now decades later, your family home is being used to line the pockets, so to speak, of someone from that family, I would be taking– I would be looking into it myself and taking, you know, having a problem with
SPEAKER_00:it, I guess
SPEAKER_01:is what
SPEAKER_00:I'm trying to say. And this relationship's really complex because she mentions that her great-grandfather, I guess it would be, Andre Poirot, the mailman who worked with Charles O'Lard, the post office person, I say mailman, it's an American thing, the post office person, That they worked in separate towns and that she says that Andre didn't even like him at all. And yet his descendant, his son, Bernard, was okay selling the house to Sebastian and it sounded like early on in Miss Poirot's letter, didn't really have that much of an issue with him calling it the Maison de Liberation house. I'm not saying that Miss Poirot... is twisting the truth in any way. I'm saying that these relationships, we're talking about some Hatfield and McCoy stuff. This stuff goes back two generations, and they're still... vitriol between them about about this this event that occurred and god knows what else that caused them to not like each other before
SPEAKER_01:well with that region of france um you know that's you know uh there's a lot of pride involved with uh the resistance and a lot of you know that region um gets a lot of its you know tourism is a big part of that region's economy okay um so you know it You know, it's just so hard to know with this stuff. But you're right. I agree. It's like if they could produce that and if it is something that was able to exonerate Mr. O'Lard, that would be I'd have that up in the house. You know, I'd have that letter up, say, see, look, this commission exonerated him, you know, and everything. And you were in there. Was there anything like that on the walls?
SPEAKER_00:To be fair, there's a lot of stuff up on the walls. It's all in French. It was all in French. I really had no
SPEAKER_01:idea. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Gosh. What I do remember being on the walls was there was a significant homage to Guattari and his son. There's articles. There's pictures. There was a lot there for that. And everything else was in French. I mean– So for me, I think what's interesting about the letter, first off, let's go back, let's reel this in. I'm really happy that someone in France listened to our podcast. Even if she didn't like what she heard, it's really cool that we've got an international audience, and we do. And it's really awesome. And for those who are listening in a different language, thank you for supporting our podcast. So that's cool that someone found it. And then... had the, whatever the word is, the gumption to reach out to us and say, there's another side to this story. And what we're learning, what we're not really learning, what we know as a race, as a species, as oral historians, as there's always more than one side of this story, it's never one-sided. And so I think the reason I'm excited about sharing this with our audience isn't because I want a feud or blood on my hands. It's because we love to get this kind of dialogue when we produce a podcast. If someone disagrees with something we did or our research or how it was conveyed, reach out to us so we can share it with other people. Now, you guys, our audience knows that this episode, those two episodes that we produced a year and a half ago, have a lot more to it than what we said. And I think there's two things we could have done. We could have just told her, leave us alone, stop being a rabble rouser, don't do that. Or we can do what we should be doing, which is constantly re-examining historical accounts of things to try to get it as objective as we can. Or
SPEAKER_01:we could have pulled the two episodes down and just pretended it never happened.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we're not going to do that. I'd rather have these people, I'd rather have this out there for people to make their own decision than to just tell one side of the story.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. One last thing I'll say in closing here, you know, I can understand at first when this whole thing started, you know, and they bought the house, you know, the, the, the Olard, you know, Sebastian bought the house off of the Poirot family. That's, you know, okay. They're like, okay, that's fine. You know, we sell our house to them, you know, and, and then it's like, okay, Mason deliberation. Well, Every town could have that, and even Sebastian had said that in correspondence. But then it became like, oh, then there's this that added to it, and that made it a little bit more unbearable. Then this was added to it, and that made it more unbearable. Now, there's several things involved that for the Poirot family and for anyone looking at this could say, this is not right. this is not the way it should be done. And they, the memory should not be honored, you know, in this way. So I can understand the contention. I hope that some proof can be made to light, especially the one, the, the, the clearing of Mr. Olar from 1945. And if, if Sebastian has that, I mean, it would be, it would do everybody a world of good to be able to see the refute, you know, that, that, that was actually, you know, And maybe it's out there and I'm unaware of it. I don't know,
SPEAKER_00:but I don't know either. I mean, we're, again, we're in hearsay on both sides. We're here saying what Sebastian's saying, what Ms. Paray is saying. And, you know, I mean, but that, that would be pardoned upon a smoking gun. That would be the thing that would be to me. It's like, all right. So maybe, you know, Sebastian sensationalized certain elements of the history of the house, but the, the general, the core of what he's doing, the passion for what he does is, is based on exonerating his great uncle, his family, let's just say his family, who has been maligned for decades in this community post-war. So I don't know, man. I want to thank Ms. Poray for reaching out to us and sharing this with us. And we hope... that you're happy that we were able to, or satisfied, you won't be happy that you're satisfied that we, you know, we, we read what you had, what you shared with us to our audience and, you know, they can, they can decide for themselves what, what, what their opinion is about what happened here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, you know, Hey, we, we start, we, we get these, uh, you know, the stuff we learn, you know, uh, Throughout doing this podcast, it never ceases to amaze me, all the different facets and different angles on all the stories and everything. And so another really interesting experience here, I think.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we're in the middle of a family feud.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. All right. Well, hey, I think that wraps it up. You know, please send us some feedback, everybody out there. You know, I know this is a little bit hard to kind of follow some of this. There's a lot of moving parts here. But, you know, that's history. There's a lot to it.
SPEAKER_00:Go to our website, Warrior Next Door. Go to the Mason Deliberation webpage. All you got to do is scroll over to the right. Clicky, clicky. Go ahead and check it out. And then, you know, see how it compares to what we said here And, you know, continue your feedback. If you're in France and you're in this community and you hear this and you think that we did an awful job or we still missed something, tell us. You know, if you're somewhere else and you listen to this and you want to add your comments to it, please tell us that as well. We love getting this back and
SPEAKER_01:forth. All right. Well, hey, I think that wraps it up. I'm Ryan Fairfield. And I'm Tony Lupo. And stick around for our next series. Thanks for joining us. Bye.