One Day in Oradour (19 page)

The one who pretended to be dead.

Dietrich thought how close he had come to ending
the boy’s daring game, to firing into his skull and snuffing out his life as he had that of so many others. What would it have mattered? He hadn’t known him and he didn’t care who he was. But as he had gazed down at his still little form, Dietrich had seen himself as a boy of the same age, wanting to make his father proud with his courage and ingenuity. He had seen in this young French boy his own hopes and dreams, and he had both pitied and admired him. So he had lowered his gun and, for the first time, spared the life of another.
If this boy dies today
, he had thought,
it will not be by my hand
. And he had turned and walked back towards the burning skyline of Oradour.

The grey figure was getting closer now, his woollen suit becoming clearer through the fog. Dietrich started to feel cold, his legs and fingers numb, and a shudder ran through his body, causing his eyes to flicker open once more. The fog was lifting and silence seemed to have fallen on the battlefield. Dietrich could see the figure’s face so clearly now he could almost touch it.

So familiar.

Maybe now.

Maybe this time.

Dietrich reached out his arm, his long, slender fingers stretching, pleading for the figure to take his
hand, but the light was fading so quickly. He tried to move his lips and he heard his own voice, faint and rasping, whispering, ‘Wait! I need to know. I have to…’

He wanted to keep his eyes open to see, but it felt like someone or something was pressing them closed. All that was left was darkness, silent darkness. Gustav Dietrich’s time had run out.

Ten years ago, I spent a day in the memorial village of Oradour-sur-Glane in the Haute-Vienne region of France. It was a day which almost happened by chance but it became a day I would never forget.

I was in France visiting my sister-in-law. She had recently moved into the area and was telling me about places of interest near to her new home in Confolens. She happened to mention a village not far away which had been destroyed by the Nazis during the Second World War. The whole place was left in ruins, she told
me, unchanged since the moment the Germans walked away.

Now, I love history, and thought myself fairly well acquainted with the key events of the Second World War, but here was a story which was completely new to me. I had to go and find out more.

Although I spent only a few hours walking the haunting ruins at Oradour-sur-Glane, the impact of my visit left images ingrained on my soul, snapshots of an extraordinary event that were to stay with me for years to come, and which would keep drawing me back. I wanted to know more about the ill-fated cast of the tragedy that took place in the village on that day in June 1944 – the locals, the day visitors, the men, women and children, and the SS soldiers who took their lives. And most of all, I wanted to know the story of one particular character, whose face in an old black and white photograph captivated me and whose image was, to me, more powerful than any other. Roger Godfrin. The only child among the mere twenty-nine survivors, he did not follow German orders to assemble in the centre of the village and had the courage and the wisdom to make an escape, climbing out of a window of his school.

Roger was just seven and three-quarters when the massacre took place. In the photograph, taken soon
after, he is back in Oradour-sur-Glane, posed rather uncomfortably among the rubble. Trench coat fastened, shirt buttoned right up to the collar, thick knee-high socks pulled up smartly, his red fringe neatly combed down under his beret. His young face, his eyes, carry a frown yet his mouth is slightly twisted, as if he is uncertain whether to smile for the camera. What a brave little soul he must have been. The boy who fooled the SS, who chose his own path to safety but was to discover, at the end of it, that he had been left an orphan. He was photographed when the trauma must have still been so raw, back in the place where his mother, his father, his three sisters and his younger brother had been murdered, just months before.

As I studied this photograph again and again, the questions started to form. How had a boy of seven found the courage and discipline to lie motionless in a field for two hours while German soldiers ransacked his village? What must have been going through his mind? Why did he refuse to go to the assembly point like everyone else and decide, instead, to escape? And what kind of man could take aim and shoot at a little boy who was running away?

Weaving the truth about what happened to the people in Oradour-sur-Glane on 10th June 1944 into a fictional
story presented one crucial challenge. It would be all too easy to shy away from revealing the true extent of the SS soldiers’ cruelty. It might be less risky, too, to change some of the more gruesome details out of fear of upsetting the reader. But to do either of those two things would be to do a disservice not only to those who lost their lives or lost loved ones that day, but also to the reader. For this is a story which can open the reader’s eyes to the extremes of human behaviour. It can hold up a mirror to a world in which, side by side, there can exist a man like Gustav Dietrich, who is willing to order the mass slaughter of hundreds of innocent people, and a seven-year-old boy like Alfred Fournier, who has the courage and sheer determination to survive against all odds while his world is turned upside down around him. And it is a story inspired by true events from which we can still learn much, even though they happened nearly seventy years ago.

Just before two o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday 10th June 1944, twenty Waffen-SS officers and 187 Waffen-SS soldiers marched into the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, sealing off all the roads in and out of the village as they did so.

It was the day before the religious festival of Corpus Christi, and the residents were in a festive mood. It was
also the day on which the tobacco rations were brought into the village. That, combined with some medical vaccinations taking place in the school, meant that the village was busier than usual, with many children coming into Oradour-sur-Glane from outlying farms and villages as well as day visitors who had come to enjoy a leisurely lunch, a bit of shopping or some fishing on the River Glane.

Although they were surprised at the sight of German troops arriving, the majority of the people in Oradour-sur-Glane that day were not unduly concerned. The village had a reputation for being relatively peaceful and had enjoyed little interference from the German occupying army.

So when everyone in the village was summoned to assemble in the market square (known as the fairground) for an identity check, the majority saw no reason not to cooperate. Only about twenty people decided to make themselves scarce, and most of these were people who had more reason than most to be suspicious of the German army, such as the Jewish and French refugee families who had made their homes in Oradour.

One such family were the Godfrins, upon whom the fictional Fournier family is based. The Godfrins had come to Oradour four years earlier after being evicted from their home in Charly, in the Lorraine region of
France. Of the five Godfrin children, three (Jeanne, age thirteen, Pierette, eleven, and Roger, seven) were at school that afternoon. All had been warned by their mother and father to flee if the Germans ever came to Oradour, but only Roger (the inspiration for the story’s young hero, Alfred) heeded that warning and escaped out of a back door of the school.

The soldiers of the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion of Der Führer Regiment who came to Oradour-sur-Glane were under the command of Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, a well-respected SS major with an excellent military record – his awards included the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st Class. In our story, Diekmann becomes Gustav Dietrich.

Many of the details in this book are based on survivors’ accounts of events that afternoon. We know that Diekmann liaised with the Mayor of Oradour, Paul Desourteaux, while his troops moved through the village making sure that everyone went to the fairground.

It took less than an hour for the majority of residents and visitors to be assembled in the fairground, and soon after the men were separated from the women and children. It is understood that Diekmann explained to the assembled crowd that the SS suspected there was a secret store of arms somewhere in Oradour
and demanded that anyone who had any information, or who possessed any such weapons, should come forward, but it is not known for certain whether this took place before or after the women and children were taken to the church.

It is also uncertain whether it was before or after this that Diekmann asked the Mayor to nominate hostages and accounts also vary as to the number of hostages he requested. Some historians put the figure at thirty while others as many as fifty, but all agree that Desourteaux refused to do so, offering himself and his four sons as hostages instead.

Once the women and children had been taken to the church, the men were taken to six different locations around the village. For the purposes of the story, the exact location of some of these sites has been moved and various fictional characters, including Leon Fournier, have been placed in specific locations in order to provide a pair of eyes through which events could be retold. However, the following details are generally known to be accurate.

The largest group of men (estimated at sixty-two) was taken to the Laudy Barn in the centre of the village. We know most about this location because it was from here that five men, including nineteen-year-old Robert Hébras, escaped.

The second location was the Milord Barn, located on the main road through the village, Rue Emile Desourteaux. We are not sure how many men lost their lives here, but of the six execution sites, this was located the closest to the church.

The third barn which was used belonged to the Bouchoule family and, as in the story, it was the site which was furthest away from the main village, near to the watermill on the River Glane. Among the bodies found here were the remains of a few women and children and some historians have suggested that these could be victims who escaped from the church or who were rounded up later.

The next execution site was the garage belonging to Hubert Desourteaux, son of the Mayor, which was located on the Rue Emile Desourteaux. No one is certain how many men died here and the murder of Patric Depaul here, in the story, is a piece of fiction. Hubert Desourteaux was, in fact, one of the few survivors from the Oradour massacre. He was an escaped prisoner of war so had good reason not to follow the SS soldiers’ orders to go to the fairground, opting instead to hide in the garden of the Desourteaux house, where he stayed until night fell before escaping from the village.

The fifth location chosen by Diekmann and his men was a wine store belonging to a Monsieur Denis just off
the Rue Emile Desourteaux on the road to Saint Junien. The remains of both men and women were found in a pit hastily dug by the SS soon after the massacre in the garden next to the store. But only one was identifiable, the body of the Mayor. He had been hit by two bullets in the chest, which had passed straight through his wallet.

The Beaulieu forge or blacksmith’s workshop was the final site. About twenty-five bodies were found here.

Around four o’clock, a signal – described by some as an explosion, by others as a gunshot – could be heard all over Oradour. This was the sign that the massacre was to begin. In the church, where over four hundred women and children were crammed together, an incendiary device (a crate full of asphyxiating ammunition) was set off, filling the nave with smoke and fumes. It has been suggested that the Germans intended to suffocate the women and children with this device but that the attempt failed. Whether or not this was the case, any women or children who tried to escape the fumes were shot, and then shots were also fired at the crowd gathered in the nave. The soldiers also threw hand grenades into the terrified crowd. Firewood, straw and wooden chairs were piled on top of the bodies and set alight by the German soldiers, some of whom were as young as eighteen.

The fictional character of Audrey Rousseau is loosely based on a true heroine from Oradour. Only one person survived the massacre in the church that day, Madame Marguerite Rouffanche, who climbed out of a window. She was followed by a woman with a baby, Madame Joyeux, but they were both killed when the Germans saw them escaping and opened fire. Madame Rouffanche was shot five times, but she managed to make her way into a nearby garden where she was found at about five o’clock the next day, still covered in soot and crying out, ‘I am suffering too much. Carry me to the river, I want to die!’

Carried in a wheelbarrow to a nearby doctor, Madame Rouffanche was to remain in hospital in Limoges for nearly a year, recovering from her physical injuries and from the mental trauma of an ordeal in which her daughter had been gunned down in front of her eyes.

While Oradour church saw the largest number of deaths on one site that tragic afternoon, the horror suffered by the men and boys at the six other sites around the village was no less shocking. Machine guns had been posted at the entrance to each site, and on the four o’clock signal, the SS soldiers opened fire, aiming not to kill but to strike low, so as to injure and maim. The bodies were then covered in hay and bundles of firewood, before being set alight.

Most of our information about what happened during this part of the massacre comes from one of the five survivors from Madame Laudy’s barn. Robert Hébras (who inspired the character of Guy Dupont), escaped through a stable and into a yard where he found four other escapees. One of these men, a stonemason named Mathieu Borie, noticed that some of the stones in the wall were not cemented in very well and began to remove them, one by one, until he had made a hole large enough for the five men to climb through into another barn. Once there, they managed to stay hidden in a hay loft until two soldiers came in and set this alight also. Still undetected, the five men, three of whom – including Robert – were injured, escaped into a yard where they hid in a poultry hut. Later, at about seven o’clock, they crept out and got safely out of Oradour by way of the fairground and the road to the cemetery.