By Liza Perrat
Once upon a time the peaceful village of
Oradour-sur-Glane sat deep in the Limousin countryside of softly folding hills,
of lakes, forests and lush fields dotted with russet-coloured cows. The people
farmed the land, fished the lakes and gossiped on the village square. They
drank in the cafés, playing cards and pétanque,
and it seemed they almost existed in ignorance of World War 2 raging around
them.
 |
| Typical French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, pre-War |
But
on the sunny afternoon of June 10, 1944, Das Reich’s SS soldiers marched into
Oradour-sur-Glane and gathered the inhabitants on the village square. “For a simple
identity check,” they claimed. They then took the men to the barns and herded
the women and children into the church. The
women and children must have heard the gunfire, as the SS machine-gunned their
menfolk in the barns. They must have smelled the smoke as the soldiers covered
the bodies –– many still alive –– with fuel and set the barns on fire.
The soldiers then detonated a
box of explosives inside the church, but the roof did not collapse as hoped, so
they finished off the job with machine guns and hand grenades. Again, they
spread straw over the dead and wounded and set the church ablaze.
 |
| Oradour-sur-Glane church |
Only two
women and one child escaped the inferno. One was 47-year-old Marguerite Rouffanche.
Her daughter dead by her side, Madame Rouffanche managed to climb out from a
sacristy window, the stained glass of which had been blown out. She fell
to the ground, but was uninjured. The second woman followed through the open
window, carrying her baby.
All three
fled, but the child’s cries attracted the attention of the SS, who shot and
killed mother and baby. Madame Rouffanche crawled away and hid in a garden
behind the church, where she remained until she was rescued the following
morning by another group of villagers who’d fled when the soldiers had first
appeared.
Later that night, after looting the village and setting it alight,
the SS fled the village. In an unbelievable violation of a serene, rural
village, 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane had been murdered in a few hours.
 |
| When the SS guns fell silent, Oradour-surGlane was no more. |
Aftermath…
After the war, the
then French president, Charles de Gaulle, decided to maintain the original site
as a permanent memorial and museum; it was to be left as it was the day of the
Das Reich soldiers’ murder and torching rampage.
Several years ago I visited these ruins, staggering about in
horrified disbelief at the remains of what was once the village of so many
living, laughing and loving families: a rusted sewing machine, plates set at a
table for the midday meal, the charred remains of a child’s doll, the blackened,
crumbling façades of their homes. The car from which the village mayor was
hauled and shot rusting on the roadside. Tram tracks running everywhere, but to
nowhere. A squashed and rusted pram littering the church floor in front of the
altar –– all of it telling the sad tale of people cut down in the midst of their
normal, usual, daily routine.
The eerie silence begs the visitor to stop walking, and if you
listen hard enough it seems you can hear their ghostly sounds: the banter and
laughter of adults, the playful shrieks of children, the barking of dogs, the
cries of the village artisans. The echoes of a village obliterated.
 | |||||
|
Stunned beyond words, I left the ruins, knowing that one day I would
write a story about Oradour-sur-Glane, and, many years later, this tragedy
became the basis for my second novel the historical L’Auberge des Anges series, Wolfsangel, published under the TriskeleBooks label in October, 2013.
Why the massacre? Why Oradour-sur-Glane?
On 10 June 1944, four days after
D-Day, the 2nd SS-Panzer Division Das Reich was getting ready to leave for
Normandy to fight the Allied landing. On the orders of Sturmbannführer
Adolf Diekmann, about two hundred of them surrounded Oradour-sur-Glane. Many
theories abound, such as reprisal for the shooting of an SS officer, or
punishment for Resistance fighters, though historians are not certain why the
unassuming little town of Oradour was singled out for such a terrible massacre.
The most likely explanation is that Das Reich was keen to make an example of a
French community, and Oradour happened to be close at hand.
What became of
the murderers?
Many were killed in Normandy during the following weeks. Those men
of the Alsace-Moselle region who had been forcibly enrolled into the SS –– the Malgré Nous –– were sentenced to prison
terms after World War II, but later pardoned. Their involvement though, still
seems to cause ill feeling within France.
Obersturmführer Heinz Barth was sentenced
to death in absentia by a French Court, but managed to hide in what was
then East Germany under a false identity. Finally captured in 1981, he received
a life sentence and was paroled in 1997 with a pension as a “war victim”.
Recently, with the release of Stasi files bringing fresh evidence
against the surviving ex-SS men allegedly present at Oradour, German
authorities have reopened cases against them:
Also inspired from dramatic fact, though on a far
smaller scale, was my first novel in L’Auberge des Anges
historical series –– Spirit of Lost Angels –– published under the Triskele Books label in May, 2012.
On a
walk along the banks of the Garon River, in the French village in which I live,
I stumbled upon a small stone cross, named croix à gros ventre (cross
with a big belly).
Engraved with a heart shape, it was
dated 1717 and commemorates two children who drowned in the river. Who were
they? How did they drown, and where are they buried? From the local historical organization, I learned a little about them,
and their tragic drowning inspired me write the story of these lost little
ones; to give them a family, a village, an identity. Thus was born the
Charpentier family, the village of Lucie-sur-Vionne, the Vionne River and the
family farm –– L’Auberge des Anges (The Inn of Angels).
Even before I had finished writing Spirit of Lost Angels, I knew the characters had more tales to tell, and I wanted to continue
the story of this family, their farmhouse and their village, and what might
have been their lives during different historical eras and upheavals. The
characters already had strong bonds: their village of Lucie-sur-Vionne,
L’Auberge des Anges (Inn of Angels) farmhouse, and their bloodline. The women
also shared the same profession: healer, midwife and angel-maker.
Wolfsangel follows the descendants of the Charpentier family a hundred and fifty
years after the French Revolution, when Lucie-sur-Vionne comes under the heel
of the German occupation, and I am
currently working on the third novel in the series, Midwife Héloïse – Blood Rose Angel, set in the same French village,
and following the same family, during the Black Plague years of the 14th
century.
Liza grew up in Wollongong, Australia, where she
worked as a general nurse and midwife for fifteen years.
When she met her French husband on a Bangkok bus, she
moved to France, where she has been living for twenty years. She works
part-time as a French-English medical translator and as a novelist.
Several of her short stories have won awards, notably
the Writers Bureau annual competition of 2004 and her stories have been
published widely in anthologies and small press magazines. Her articles on
French culture and tradition have been published in international magazines
such as France Magazine and France Today.
She has completed four novels and one short-story
collection, and is represented by Judith Murdoch of the Judith Murdoch Literary
Agency.
Liza is a
co-founder and member of the exciting new author collective, Triskele Books.
For more
information about Liza, please visit her website.
Spirit of Lost Angels: Available as
eBook and paperback at all Amazon stores, Kobo, and Smashwords.
Wolfsangel: Available as
eBook and paperback at Amazon stores, Smashwords and Kobo.
Friends, Family & Other Strangers From Downunder: A collection of
fourteen humorous, horrific and entertaining short stories about Australians,
for readers everywhere. Available as eBook at all Amazon stores.
The Triskele
Trail:
Once
upon a time, there were five writers.
They
believed there was a third way of publishing, somewhere over the rainbow.
So
they packed their books and set off to explore.
This
is what happened on the journey.
The
Triskele Trail is a true story.
About
a writers' collective who made some mistakes and some smart decisions; who
discovered opportunities, found friends and dodged predators in the independent
publishing jungle.
Fourteen
books later, here are the lessons we learned.
This
is not a How-To book.
This
is How-We-Did-It.
This
is The Triskele Trail.
Available as an e-Book at all Amazon stores.
Contact and Other Information
E-mail: liza.perrat@gmail.com
Website: www.lizaperrat.com
Twitter:
@LizaPerrat
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liza.perrat.5
Author Collective: www.triskelebooks.co.uk
Twitter:
@TriskeleBooks
Critique Service for Writers
Flash 500 Home Page: Flash Fiction, Humour Verse
and Novel Opening Chapter and Synopsis Competitions
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