KEY POINTS:
The charred remains of the French village don't smell of smoke any more, 63 years after the massacre and the fires. Not to a visitor, anyway.
Those who live in the area say different. They say the smell of smoke will always be there. The first whiff, they
say, is at the entrance to the village, where the sign says, Silence.
But it is strongest in the church, where 247 women and 205 children died. Stand back from the altar, they say, under the fire-blackened stone roof of the alcove and to the left of the rusting frame of a baby's pram on the flagstone floor.
Face the stained-glass window and keep the confession box over your left shoulder. Close your eyes and stare into the darkness. That's when the smoke comes back, they say. The fire burned so hot that day it melted the church's brass bell.
But the only thing hanging in the chilly air at the entrance to the village this January morning is the silence - and the squawk of a crow from somewhere within the ruins. "It is here to guide us," said the English woman in the group.
Perhaps she was right. For the next couple of hours the bird's haunting cry hung above us on a stroll through a time capsule: Oradour-sur-Glane, the "village of the martyrs", 22km along the N141 road from Limoges to Angouleme, in the Limousin region of France.
There are ruins throughout Europe, but there is nothing like this village. It is not on the tourist trail. France brings its schoolchildren here. They are greeted by a sign in French saying, "Time has remained fixed here to make us remember."
Visitors to Oradour-sur-Glane will never forget. The village is largely the same as it was after June 10, 1944, when 120 Nazi SS soldiers massacred 642 men, women and children and set the place on fire.
Free French leader General - later President - Charles de Gaulle wanted it conserved. "Oradour-sur-Glane is the symbol of what our country had suffered. Never again must a comparable evil occur," he said at the end of World War II. Oradour means place of prayer, or shrine.
It is a village of rust and ruin - but it remains very much alive. The roofs and timber supports of the mostly two-storey buildings are gone. But their quarried stone skeletons survive. So do the pots and pans on gas cookers, in what were kitchens. Rusted sewing machines lie in the ruins of what were once perhaps living rooms. Tiled foyers lead to what once were rooms, upstairs and downstairs.
Cut into the stone near many of the doorways remain original blue porcelain plaques, a bit bigger than a postcard, identifying the owners.
They are the village signposts. They survived the fires and the bullets. The baker who lived here didn't. Nor did the grocer, butcher, dressmaker, carpenter, lawyer, or doctor.
Outside, Renault, Citroen, Peugeot and Simca cars and vans sit on the streets and in parking areas where their drivers left them and where the fires consumed them. Some still have keys in the ignition. Rusted skeletons of pushbikes lean against walls; rusted hand-operated water pumps stand in what were back gardens; a sign on what was the village garage offers a service for Renault vehicles. There is a petrol pump there too.
Further down the main street, where the narrow-gauge tram line links with Limoges, and near where the 15th-century church sits, the crow breaks its silence again. The English woman tells us that medieval Christians held that the crow could divine the future and dismantle the past.
She said the crow has 27 different cries and can mimic many kinds of sounds. The ancient Greeks said it could change appearance. North American Indians believed its far-seeing eye saw the past, present, and future ... all at once.
But this day it wants to be heard and not seen, she says. It squawks again near a barn. A sign on the stone wall says: "Here at this place of torment a group of men were massacred and burned by the Nazis. Compose yourself."
June 10, 1944, was a Saturday. It was tobacco ration day in Oradour-sur-Glane and there were more men about than usual, many from outlying farms.
The Nazi SS unit arrived around lunchtime and herded the villagers into the fairground. The men were marched one way, to barns and garages. The women and children were shoehorned into the small church. Then the shooting began.
The woman who ran the post office was the only person to survive the massacre in the church.
Marguerite Rouffanche jumped 4m from the shattered stained-glass window behind the altar to the ground below. She was 47.
A young mother with babe in arms jumped too. Both women crouched low in the long grass and wild flowers, searching for an escape route. But the Nazis shot them. Mother and child died. Rouffanche didn't. She feigned death and later crawled to the vegetable garden the village priest had planted and dug herself into the earth between rows of peas.
Rouffanche remained hidden until the next day, bleeding into the tilled earth, listening to the village burn, fighting the pain of five bullet wounds ... and the memory of watching the youngest of her five daughters die in her arms.
Later, she would tell what happened to the women and children. The faulty firebomb near the church door, the choking smoke, the screams, the bullets, the grenades, the fires, the death of her daughter ... the smell of burning flesh.
She would learn of the killing of her husband and almost all of the men in the village, including the priest. The invalid shot in his bed, the baby boy incinerated in the bakery oven, the bodies tossed down the well, the men forced into a barn, shot in the legs, covered with wood and straw and burned alive. She would learn how, when the killing was done, the Nazis set fire to every building. How they left on trucks carrying everything they could steal. Curiously, how they let passengers on the tram from Limoges, witnesses to the carnage, go free. More curious still, how the Nazis left without saying a word.
Post-war probes by France, Britain, the US and Germany revealed little more. The SS officer who commanded the unit and ordered the killings, Sturmbannfuhrer Adolf Diekmann - an instructor at an SS officer training school in Germany for much of the war - died two weeks later from gunshot wounds near Normandy, fighting the Allied landing.
In 1953, 21 of the surviving SS soldiers under Diekmann's command that day - many of them young French conscripts from Alsace, the German border region of France - would tell a show trial in France that they were merely following orders.
Rouffanche was the state's main witness. She told the court: "I ask that justice be done with God's help. I came out alive from the crematory oven. I am the sacred witness from the church. I am a mother who has lost everything."
The court sentenced two of the men to death and 19 to prison for up to 12 years. France was a troubled post-war nation. Politics and provinces split families. Lawyers, politicians, judges and General de Gaulle all had conflicting views. Months later, all 21 went free.
Some accounts say the massacre was in reprisal for the kidnapping and execution of an SS officer by the French resistance. Others say the village stored guns and explosives for the Resistance. One account has it that the Resistance hid gold bullion captured in an ambush of a German convoy in the village.
The French daily Le Monde said many years later: "Despite the efforts of investigators and historians, all that we know for certain is the identity of the troops who carried out the massacre." The only Nazi who spent time in prison for the killings was SS officer Heinz Barth. He had been a platoon leader in command of 45 men. He was charged in Berlin in 1983 with ordering the execution of 20 men in a garage, the one with the Renault service sign. He was sentenced to life in prison, but was released in a unified Germany in 1997."
Rouffanche died in 1988, aged 91. She is buried in the village cemetery, among the graves of the martyrs.
But where she jumped from the church window to the ground below, 63 years ago this week, is where visitors linger.
They whisper, softly defying the sign at the gate. They contemplate the jump, their eyes following the fall. Then to the corner of the church, where the SS killers appeared, and the line of fire. Then to the path Rouffanche crawled along for her life, towards the garden and the row of peas in the soft June earth.
More silence, broken by whispers. A woman points to a spot beyond the garden. A man with her points higher, towards the west, where the sun sets.
Then the crow squawks again. "There is more to see," says the English woman. There will always be more to see.
Checklist
Getting There
Oradour-sur-Glane's nearest city is Limoges, famous for its porcelain, and the site of the French National Porcelain Museum, which has a regular train service from Paris. If you are driving from Paris, take the A20 from Vierzon and follow the signs for Oradour, which begin just north of Limoges. Oradour is about 20km west of Limoges on the road to the old Roman market town of Angouleme. Buses run from Limoges to Oradour and there is a large car park and visitor centre near the entrance to the ruins.
Oradour-Sur-Glanes There are two Oradour-sur-Glanes; the village of the martyrs and a new town just up the road, whose motto is: "Ni haine, ni oubli" - "Neither hate nor forgetfulness."
Entry to the ruins is free, although there is a ¬7 charge to visit the small museum near the cemetery gate. The village is open all year round. The visitor centre is open daily from February 1 to December 15.
Where to stay
There are several hotels in the new Oradour and many hotels in Limoges.
Further information
The village website is www.oradour.org
