For
centuries, what made the medieval village of Oradour special was its
succulent freshwater crayfish. A delicacy for lovers of good cuisine,
they could be found in the clear, sparkling waters of the River Glane as
it ran through the wide pastures of the Limousin region in
south-central France.
This was a peaceful, pastoral village whose very name, Oradour, meant 'a place of prayer' in the local Occitan patois.
Until
one sunny Saturday afternoon in June 1944 when a regiment from the 'Das
Reich' panzer division of the Waffen-SS surrounded it and, in scenes of
unimaginable horror, ripped it and its inhabitants apart, leaving
nothing but smoking ruins with whole generations wiped out.
What
happened to Oradour-sur-Glane that day 77 years ago — in a crime
against humanity which can be fairly compared with the Holocaust in
terms of its savagery — is graphically revived in a powerful new book,
Silent Village, by British historian Robert Pike.
In
it, he goes behind the grim statistics and the terrible symbolism of
its destruction, taking us back into the lives of the villagers as they
went about their everyday business, unaware of the disaster that was
about to engulf them.
Here was a group of
individuals, each with his or her own story that brought them —
unwittingly, innocently, haphazardly — to the wrong place at the wrong
time and to their terrible collective fate. Knowing their connections,
friendships and rivalries makes their brutal end even more tragic.
Surrounded
by farms and hamlets, the village itself was a bustling bourg of some
150 homes, barns and buildings spread out along a partially cobbled
street.
Its shops, restaurants and bars were a
hive of activity and gossip. Blacksmiths and wheelwrights plied their
trade alongside a cottage industry of clog-makers, glove-makers, weavers
and dress-makers. The village had its own brass and wind orchestra and
regular dances were held in one of the hotels.
Once
a month a lively market for animals and produce was held on the champ
de foire, the village square, as it had been for the past 400 years.
There
were four schools — one for boys, one for girls, one for infants and
one for refugees — all thriving, and, at the hub of the village, a
church, the Eglise Saint-Martin, dating from the 12th century. The
villagers were blessed, living in their own semi-gilded bubble away from
the war engulfing much of the rest of France. They had not seen a
German uniform on their streets since 1942 when a convoy of soldiers
passed fleetingly through.
Indeed, unusually
for the area there were no active members of the Maquis, the armed
French Resistance, in the village. Oradour was happy to be a
politics-free zone: 'What mattered to them,' writes Pike, 'was putting
food on the table and a trouble-free existence for their family.'
They
typified the generally passive French attitude to their German
occupiers. Shutters closed. Eyes shut. Waiting for it all to end.
This,
then, was Oradour-sur-Glane on the morning of June 10, 1944. The
children were in school, one of their teachers, Odette Couty, taking
lessons for the last time before moving away to a new job.
Mechanic
Robert Hébras should have been at work in Limoges that day but had been
warned to stay away by his boss over a separate altercation his boss
had had with a Nazi officer, so was at home, fitting an electric socket
for a friend.
Men from nearby farms were making
their Saturday trip in to pick up their weekly cigarette ration from
the tabac. There was much chat in the bars about the village team's
football match tomorrow.
Such was the serendipity of who lived and who died.
It
was around two in the afternoon when, out of nowhere, the air was
shattered by the roar of engines, as trucks and troop carriers bristling
with rifles and machine guns approached Oradour.
Helmeted,
heavily armed soldiers fanned out into the fields and set up a cordon
around the village, trapping everyone inside. Inhabitants were rounded
up at gunpoint or forced from their homes and shepherded to the square.
They
were nervous, some in tears, but reassuring each other that this was
just a routine identity check or some sort of military exercise. Nothing
to worry about.
Mothers pushed babies in their
prams. One old man had to be physically supported, having been forced
out of his sick bed. Some villagers had been snatched from their
workplaces — a baker stood semi-naked in his vest, still covered in
flour from the bread he'd been making in his boulangerie.
Then
came the schoolchildren, toddlers walking hand-in-hand in a line, their
teachers calming them by telling them they were going to have their
photograph taken.
In the square, four heavy
machine guns awaited them. Soldiers carrying grenades were stacking up
firewood. An armoured car arrived with more people picked up in the
surrounding fields.They were all left standing in the square for an
hour. What was going on? Nobody knew. Nerves began to shred in the
afternoon heat.
Then they were divided into two
groups — men on the left, ordered to face a wall; women and children on
the right, lined up together in a column. Fears grew. There were
anguished cries.
As they were marched away to the village church, several women fainted.
Back
in the square, the questioning began. Where was the Resistance's arms
stash? No one said — because there wasn't one. The mayor was asked to
select 50 hostages. He refused on principle.
The
200 men were split into six groups and herded into barns and warehouses
in the village. Outside, machine-gun posts were set up.
Again
they waited. Half an hour ticked by. Suddenly there was a loud boom
from a tank and on this signal — it was clearly a planned operation —
the Germans opened fire at random into the buildings.
'Bullets
screamed in from everywhere,' Robert Hébras recalled, 'ricocheting off
the walls.' Bodies fell under the hail of bullets and piled up.
'The
injured were crying out, howling, some calling for their wives and
children,' remembered one man. 'The Germans came in and climbed on to
the bodies to finish them off with a revolver.'
Another
recalled: 'A friend was laid across my chest and his blood was soaking
me. I heard the breech of a gun click and then a muffled blow. I felt
him shudder, tremble, then nothing more.'
Hébras
himself was shot multiple times, but survived. 'The bullets had passed
through the others and by the time they reached me they no longer had
the power to go in deep.'
Given that the Germans must have been aware that some of their victims were still alive, what came next was even more barbaric.
They
hurled straw and wood on to the bodies and set the buildings ablaze.
Another survivor recalled the soldiers, drunk on wine and champagne
looted from the village bars, laughing as they did so.
In
the village church, 250 women and more than 200 children were squashed
in and the doors locked behind them. They felt safe enough in God's
house. Surely no harm could come to them there?
Farmer's
wife Marguerite Rouffanche recalled them all waiting anxiously.
Suddenly two soldiers forced their way through, carrying a heavy box,
which they left in front of the altar.
She
noticed it had lots of white strings hanging out. Several moments later a
muffled detonation came from within the box and acrid black smoke began
pouring out of it, filling the entire church.
The smoke was asphyxiating, so women and children began screaming and crying for help.
'Everybody
was panicking and trying to get clear but there was nowhere to get
away. People were climbing over each other, whole families,
schoolchildren, mothers carrying babies.'
As
the smoke engulfed her, Marguerite forced open the door of the tiny
sacristy (the priest's robing room) and hid there with her daughters and
baby grandson.
In the nave of the church hundreds lay dead and dying, suffocated by the smoke.
The
SS threw open the doors and sprayed bullets in all directions, killing
anyone still alive and splintering the plaque to Oradour's 99 1914-18
war dead. Incendiary grenades followed, and the whole place went up in
flames.
In the sacristy, Marguerite could only
watch dumb-struck as her daughters and grandson fell through the burning
floor into an inferno below.
More than half of those people were burnt alive,' Marguerite would later say.
Miraculously
she escaped, creeping out of the sacristy under cover of the smoke,
climbing a step-ladder to the window behind the altar and throwing
herself through it.
'A neighbour, who was a
mother of a small baby, followed me through the window but was killed as
she did so. She tried to pass her baby to me but I was unable to catch
him.'
Badly burned and riddled with bullets,
Marguerite somehow managed to get away and hide. When it was all over,
she had to be told that, as well as her daughters and grandson, her
husband and son were also dead.
No one was
spared. People approaching the cordon were shot and killed, including
mothers looking for their children. Cyclists just passing through were
stopped, lined up and gunned down too.
In one
of the blazing barns, Robert Hébras managed to extricate himself from
the tangle of bodies on top of him and discovered a door into a walled
courtyard. He found himself with three other survivors, all of them
badly injured.
They scraped a hole in the wall
and ran for any cover they could find while soldiers patrolled the
village, executing anyone trying to escape or who had come into the
village looking for loved ones.
Systematically they burnt down houses, shops, the schools, the town hall, reducing the village to a smoky, smouldering ruin.
A
dark cloud of ash was settling over the surrounding countryside as the
Waffen-SS finally packed up and left. A few returned the next day to dig
mass graves, burn bodies and properties to erase the village and ensure
victims could not be identified.
Slowly a
trickle of people came back to the village to find horrors beyond
imagination. Everywhere they looked was a personal tragedy, an
unbearable loss.
Camille Senon, who had been working in
Limoges when the Germans descended on her village, found her father,
grandfather, cousin and other relatives dead.
'The
sister of my father, her husband, their daughter, had all been
massacred, along with many other cousins. The youngest was 12 days old
and he had a brother who was three and a sister who was two.'
As
for the village itself, 'window sills still had flowers on them.
Cooking pots hung in the fireplaces, and coffee pots stood on stoves.
But the houses were in ruins. I kept thinking I would surely see a house
that was intact, someone alive or a familiar face. But no'.
Maria
Démery, desperate to find her sons, struggled through the thick smoke
to the boys' school. She found it empty. One of the classrooms was in
flames, the tables on fire. Schoolbags and berets belonging to the
children were still hung up on the wall.
Nearby,
a grieving relative who made his way through the still-burning ruins of
the church stumbled on piles of bodies. 'Others, mainly children and
half-burnt, were strewn across the nave.'
Inside
the scorched confessional box were the bodies of two boys, crouching
next to each other, one about 12, the other a little older.
Marie
and Jean Hyvernaud came looking for their sons, eight-year-old Marcel
and ten-year-old René, who had gone to school that morning but not come
home. They found Marcel, laid out on his side.
Jean
recalls: 'It was my little one. His mouth was open, he seemed scared.
His foot was broken and twisted around. I was still able to give him a
kiss.' But of René, there were not even his remains to identify and
bury.
Corpses were strewn everywhere. One woman was discovered
at the bottom of a well, her body so badly burnt she could barely be
identified, along with other bodies that never were. The charred remains
of a baby were found in dustbin.
Maria Démery never found her sons. In total, she lost 13 members of her family.
Oradour-sur-Glane
has long been a cause célèbre for France, its people hailed not just as
victims but martyrs. On that single day, three, sometimes four,
generations of families were murdered, whole classes of schoolchildren
were wiped out, even babies in prams were slaughtered.
In
total 643 villagers died. The Nazi aim had been to erase the community
from the map and they very nearly succeeded: only five lived to tell the
tale — Marguerite Rouffanche was the only woman. Each survival was a
minor miracle.
But the question remains: why Oradour? Why did the SS pick on this particular village?
Despite
German claims, there was no evidence ever of Resistance activity in the
village. The truth is it was not destroyed as a reprisal for anything
its people had done, but as a terrible demonstration to the French
people of what to expect if they took up active opposition to German
occupation.
If it hadn't been Oradour, it would have been some other unsuspecting community.
Oradour
was picked partly because its geography made it easy to surround and
contain. But the main reason was that the SS knew the villagers would
not fight back.
There were villages not so far
away where there indeed was Resistance activity, but the SS did not want
to risk a battle. Their destruction of peaceful Oradour was an act not
just of evil and malice but also cowardice.
It
also backfired. What was supposed to be a warning instead became a
rallying cry. Until then, the Resistance had made little headway against
the occupiers. Sparked by Oradour and other atrocities around the same
time, the fightback began in earnest.
After the war, General
Charles de Gaulle decreed the village would not be rebuilt. Instead it
would remain as it was left — destroyed houses, rubbled streets,
burnt-out cars — and so it is today: a permanent memorial to the 643
dead and a potent and unforgettable symbol of the cruelty of France's
Nazi occupiers.
Vwegba World
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