Das Reich (29 page)

When a seven-year-old boy named Roger Godfrin shouted to his sisters in the rush from the classroom that they should all bolt, he was ignored. He himself ran away: ‘I was very frightened, because I was from Lorraine and I knew what they were like.’ He lost a shoe scrambling through a hedge at the edge of the schoolyard, then found himself pursued by a volley of shots. He rolled over and lay limp. A soldier kicked him in casual confirmation of death and moved on. The boy, uninjured, lay motionless, listening to more shooting. Then he leaped to his feet and fled onwards out of the village. He glimpsed a mechanic named Poutaraud being shot by two soldiers, sagging to the ground at the foot of a fence. One of the Germans saw the boy, and fired again. But Roger Godfrin scampered on and on until he reached the river, and fell panting under the safety of its bank. There he lay until silence fell, many hours later, and he crept on through the woods until he reached a farmhouse where he found safety.

It was now about 2.45. The entire population of Oradour except a few of the old, the crippled or the fugitive, who still lingered in their beds or hiding places, faced each other across the Champ de Foire, men on one side, women and children on
the other. German machine gun teams had set up their Spandaus covering the square, the gunners lying at their weapons, ammunition belts curling into the breeches. Some of the women and children were crying noisily, but many simply stared in bewilderment, clutching each other’s hands.

The men stood in their faded blue peasant overalls, grey or black suits, much-mended shoes. The local
gendarme
, Duquerry, was in uniform. Boucholle, the old baker, had come directly from his ovens and stood naked to the waist, covered in flour, impatient to be back at his business. After a few minutes, he asked a German NCO if he could go back and do something about the pastry that was still baking. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that,’ said the soldier shortly. Suddenly, into the centre of the assembly drove Dr Jean Desourteaux, the mayor’s son, back from visiting a patient. Covered by an SS man, he hurried from his car to the corner where his father was talking to an officer, probably either Kahn or Dickmann. A witness afterwards claimed to have heard the German demanding that the mayor select thirty hostages. In the background, all of them could hear sporadic shooting. They could not know that isolated civilians were already dying, but they were acutely conscious of danger.

The Germans suddenly began to move decisively. All the women and children were to be taken to the church, they announced. Herded by an SS detail, rifles at the port, the long procession of old and young, mothers clutching their babies and grandmothers supported by their families, shuffled across the road and a few yards down the hill to the tall church with its red Romanesque tiles and turreted spires, its crucified Christ upon the outer wall. Inside, it was cool and dim, but bright with flowers for next day’s first communion. Oradour was not a notably religious community – indeed, for years attendance at Sunday services had been sparse. Abbé Chapelle was old and sick, and had few personal friends in the village. Each day he walked three miles in all weathers to his other parish, Javerdat, to hold its masses. Ironically enough, he had always spoken warmly of Marshal Pétain from his
pulpit, and offered prayers for the victims of Allied bombing. Now, while he waited with the men, the nave and altar steps of his church filled with women and children, and their nervous cries and whispers echoed from the walls.

The men were ordered to seat themselves in three rows, facing the wall of the houses flanking the Champ de Foire. An SS trooper, probably an Alsatian, shouted in fluent French: ‘There are concealed weapons and stocks of ammunition in this town that have been hidden by terrorists. A house-to-house search will be conducted. While this is going on, you will be assembled in barns and garages to facilitate operations. If you know of any place in which weapons are stored, you must report the fact immediately!’ An elderly farmer named Jean Lamaud called out that he possessed a shotgun and a police permit for it. ‘We’re not interested in that,’ said the trooper. The men were ordered to their feet. Forty and fifty at a time, they were marshalled by the Germans and led briskly out of the Champ de Foire. One party was directed into Mme Laudy’s big coach house fifty yards up the street. One by one, the other groups filed into five other garages and barns whose doors had been thrown open to make way for them. They huddled together, like all threatened animals, at the furthest end from their captors. It was about 3.30. There was a single shot from the square. Shouting like men advancing to the charge against the enemy, the Germans began to pour fire into the crowds of Frenchmen in their execution chambers.

An eighteen-year-old boy named Yves Roby had been seized as he cycled up the road past Oradour. He was one of those herded into the Laudy barn. He became one of the only five male survivors of the executions who lived to testify about events in Oradour that afternoon:

The first men to fall were protected from the shots that followed by the bodies of those who fell over them. Roby threw himself flat on his stomach and hid his head in his arms. As the roar of gunfire echoed ceaselessly through the coach house, the air filled with choking brick dust, fragments from the ricochets, and wounded men’s screams for their wives, mothers and children. Then the shooting stopped. The Germans strode forward to the mound of prostrate bodies, and began shooting with pistols each one that moved or groaned. Roby lay terrified, waiting for the shot that he expected to finish him. It caught his left elbow. He lay motionless until at last the groaning died away and the shooting stopped. Soldiers began to move around them again, dragging in straw, hay, brushwood and saddlery and heaping it upon the bodies. Then they tossed down a match and left the building, closing the doors. Flames began to race through the coach house.

Roby found himself fighting to pull his body from the weight of those above it, as a handful of other survivors did likewise. Several more lay badly wounded and covered with blood, yet visibly alive. There was nothing to be done for them. Struggling frenziedly despite his smashed arm, Roby at last fought free. He clambered to his feet, expecting a shot, and saw that the Germans had gone.

A German suddenly stepped into the barn, put a burning brand to the straw that covered them, and walked out again. The Frenchmen lay motionless as flames leaped up, scorching Roby’s feet. He cautiously put up his head, to see Broussardier dashing across the barn – he had seen a way out. The two men dashed through a rear door, and found themselves in a tiny yard containing a big rabbit hutch. They crawled into it, and burrowed deep into the earth and straw at its base. There they lay for three hours.

But the fires now enveloping Oradour at last reached the rabbit hutch. Almost choked with smoke, brushing away burning fragments that singed his hair, Roby forced his way out, followed by the coughing, spluttering Broussardier. They crept furtively towards the Champ de Foire. Broussardier slipped forward to look for Germans. He saw none. The two men burst into a run, fleeing towards the graveyard, and at last into the safety of thick undergrowth. ‘We were so overjoyed at coming back to life that we kissed each other. I spent the rest of the night in a rye field, and returned home to Basse-Forêt the following day, Sunday, at about eleven o’clock.’

Jean Darthout, the man shot in both legs, also miraculously survived with two others. But many more who had neither been killed in the initial firing, nor dispatched by
coup de grâce
, died in the flames that were now enveloping Oradour. German troopers ran from house to house, starting fires. Here and there they discovered fugitives who had escaped the initial round-up. Some were dispatched where they lay. A few belatedly discovered women and children were pushed into the burning barns and shot, their bodies falling among those of the men. Five young men and a girl, seized when they cycled up just as the executions began, were shot against the wall of the forge.

The three young Jews who had hidden under the stairway of the Hôtel Avril were driven to bolt from their refuge when flames
and smoke overwhelmed the building. Late in the afternoon, surrounded by the horror of the burning town, they ran across the yard behind the hotel and into the arms of an SS trooper. The oldest girl asked him simply: ‘What are we to do?’ The soldier stared down at her for a moment in silence, then swept his arm aside in an urgent gesture of dismissal. The three ran through the houses, across the fields, and many hours later to a château where they found shelter. It was an almost unique gesture of mercy among the events of the afternoon.

The Beaubreuil boys were the children of the local carpenter and, since one of them was an STO evader, their father hid them immediately under the living-room floor when he heard that the Germans were in Oradour. There they lay listening in terror to the sound of boots, shouted commands and shots. They heard a neighbour cry: ‘
Nous sommes perdus!
’ There were screams. There was a smell of petrol or paraffin, and suddenly choking flames. The boys crawled from their refuge, and ran four miles to St Victorien without stopping, and miraculously without encountering a German soldier.

Hubert Desourteaux, a twenty-nine-year-old car dealer and escaped prisoner of war, had also hidden under a stairwell when he heard the Germans arrive. He was the only survivor of the mayor’s family. His mechanic, Aimé Renaud – the man who scented danger the moment he saw Dickmann’s convoy roar up the main street – had hidden with his wife in the yard behind the Desourteaux’ house. They lay there all that afternoon and into the night, listening to the screams, the gunfire, and later the explosion of grenades. They were convinced that they were to die. Jeannine Renaud’s mother and her four-year-old daughter were with the other women in the church.

Something over 400 women and children were crowded into the church by the time the doors were slammed upon them. Two SS remained inside, covering them, until the doors opened again to
admit a group of soldiers carrying a heavy box. One woman, Marguerite Rouffranche, was struck by how very young they looked. They dumped their load at the intersection of nave and chancel, lit the fuse protruding from it, and retired down the church. Thick black smoke began to pour from the box, which appeared to contain some incendiary device. Women and children screamed and started to struggle for refuge. The Germans at the west end of the church cocked their weapons and stripped the tape from their grenades. As the first bursts of fire echoed through the town from the barns where the men were dying, the SS began hurling grenades and emptying gunfire into the great throng of women, children and babies. To their anger, they suddenly saw that the door to the vestry lay open. Fugitives were fighting their way through it. Troopers ran forward, firing as they came. They pushed through the door and began machine gunning those lying and crouching inside. Mme Rouffranche saw her daughter fall dead. She herself slipped to the ground and lay still. Two boys of ten and twelve who ran into the confessional were shot in the neck at point-blank range. One Levignac boy had already died with the men in the barns. The other, along with little Dominique Forest, the four-year-old Renaud girl, Lucien and Marcel Boulestin whose mother had scrubbed them in the tub under the apple trees to be clean for medical inspection, Bernadette Cordeau, Roger Joyeux, four, Henri Joyeux, five, eighteen members of the Bardet family aged from sixty-four to four months, Marie Claude Milaud, four months, Mme Leroy whose papers were in order, Mme Belivier who had sent her sons to hide, the Jewish mother who had left her children beneath the stairway – died with some 400 others that afternoon in the church.

Prams, chairs and the confessional were riddled with bullet holes, the walls pock-marked with gunfire in the dreadful cacophony of screams and shooting. Women and children with their clothes on fire ran shrieking hopelessly in search of refuge. The SS heaped straw and chairs upon the bodies of the dead and wounded, fired it, and finally departed. The flames spread rapidly,
and soon the entire building was blazing, the roof timbers cracking and collapsing into the nightmare spectacle beneath.

One woman, Mme Rouffranche, escaped. Behind the high altar she noticed three windows. Hauling herself up on a stand upon which the Abbé stood to light his candles, she climbed on to a buttress above it and flung herself from the window. She fell ten feet, and looked up to see another woman attempting to jump behind her. Henriette Joyeux was clutching her seven-month-old baby. Suddenly it slipped from her grasp, fell and screamed. The Germans turned, caught the scene and fired at once. Mme Joyeux fell back dead into the church, and the child was killed where it had fallen. Marguerite Rouffranche fled for her life along the chancel wall, stumbling as bullets struck her – she was hit five times – but scrambled frenziedly on. Between the rows of peas in a tiny vegetable garden she found a refuge and literally buried herself in the earth until, many hours later, the silence of death descended upon Oradour.