French village keeps WWII vigil

I take particular pleasure from sitting at a train window, watching rural France go by, so green and well tended, with things reassuringly where they ought to be. On a recent train trip to Limoges, about three hours south of Paris, I felt that pleasure again, but this time the peaceful illusion was soon shattered.

My destination was Oradour-sur-Glane, 13 miles northwest of Limoges, in an honest and fruitful-looking countryside much like rural Ohio. A friend in Paris was surprised when I told him I was going there until I reminded him of Oradour’s past.

Actually, there are two Oradour-sur-Glanes, one a modern village on a hill, the other 40 acres of ruins where the old Oradour stood before Germans marched in on the afternoon of June 10, 1944. The SS Panzer Division of the Reich had been in the region rooting out resisters and was headed to Normandy, where the Allies had landed four days earlier. Before leaving, they killed 642 civilians and burned the village to the ground.

The inhabitants were so unsuspecting and the Germans so brutal that Oradour became a symbol, a martyred village and historic site left unchanged after the Nazis hid the remains of their victims in mass graves and decamped.

I came here just a few days before the 60th anniversary of the D-day invasion, which gave my visit special meaning. For most Americans, World War II seems a simple matter of good versus evil. But for the French, the war remains far more complicated, not least because the country succumbed to Germany in six short weeks.

Four long years of German occupation followed, pitting French resisters against collaborators; everyone else, including Oradour’s residents, remained in the ambiguous middle. In “Martyred Village,” author Sarah Farmer wrote: “During the war years, between 5,200 and 6,700 French people were killed by their compatriots.”

By visiting Oradour, I learned some visceral lessons.

As you approach on the D9 road, you see the spire of the new church first, then the village. Somewhat tiresomely uniform, it was built by the government, with the same public buildings on the main street as the original. But for the few survivors who took possession of new homes there in 1953, it must have seemed strange. The occasion was further marred when amnesties were granted to 13 Alsatian soldiers, German army conscripts who had participated in the massacre.

I went first to the Centre of Remembrance for Oradour, which introduces visitors to the world in which the massacre occurred: The Germans were fighting on three fronts, not yet sure that Normandy posed the ultimate threat.

The French occupation government, which had its headquarters at Vichy, was ostensibly trying to make life bearable for its defeated people.

In the aftermath of the Allied landings, resisters known as the Maquis were coming out of hiding to fight the Germans, resulting in ugly reprisals. The area around Oradour was a communist stronghold that fed the Maquis, which sealed the area’s doom when the communist-hating Nazis arrived.

Caught between these forces, the people of Oradour-sur-Glane barely stood a chance. They had been living quietly through the war, rarely encountering Germans, although they had welcomed about 150 French and foreign refugees, most of whom died in the massacre.

You walk through a tunnel from the museum to the ruins, alighting by a sign that says “Silence.” There are no aids to exploration, only the occasional sign telling who lived or worked where: the dentist Madame Reiguier, the coiffeur J. Valentin. Ivy climbs over the tumble-down stone walls. Some pretty lintels have endured, as have the tracks of the tramway that once served the village. If you have a map, you can find the sheds and garages where the men of Oradour were mowed down by SS gunners. Beyond that, all roads lead to the shell of the church where the women and children of Oradour-sur-Glane were shot, blown up by grenades or burned alive.

The cemetery is the only part of the old town left intact. There is a monument: tablets with the names of the victims -- Marcel Demery, 10; Jean Desvignes, 79; Henriette Joyeux, 23 -- and two glass-topped ossuaries containing some of their remains. I was moved by the Lamand-Roby-Brandy tomb, with the pictures of eight family members who died in the village on June 10, 1944.

At a hotel outside Limoges that evening, I read myself to sleep. Farmer wrote that the Nazis identified Oradour as a place to teach a harsh lesson to the French who had done nothing to oppose the resistance. For these people, the other option was supporting Vichy, which deported 200,000 -- including 76,000 Jews -- to German labor and concentration camps. And then there were those caught in an even more hellish middle: the SS conscript soldiers, mostly teenagers, who had never seen the front line but helped kill 642 people in Oradour and who went free in 1953.

For the first time, Alsatians attended this year’s commemoration of the massacre, a gesture of reconciliation amid others such as the inclusion of German heads of state at the 60th anniversary D-day celebrations. Perhaps, in time, all the ugliness will be smoothed over.

But, for me, it was important to see Oradour-sur-Glane, to understand and remember precisely what that ugliness meant in France.

Susan Spano’s “Postcards From Paris” are posted at www.latimes.com/susanspano. She welcomes comments at postcards@latimes.com but regrets that she cannot respond to them individually.