The Waterbury Democrat., 1944-12-18
BY TOM WOLF NEA Staff Correspondent


 Oradour- Sur Glane, Dec. 18.-It is probable that the German com mander meant this butchers to go to Oradour-sur-V -Vayres. There was maquis near there. It is prob able that the column simply got lost and miStook Oradour- -sur- Glane for Oradour-Sur-Vayres only 20 miles away.
 Such is the tragic irony of the story of German savagery which outranks even Lidice for passion less, bestial murder. In Lidice the women and children, at least, were taken away and spared. Here there was no such sentiment. Women and children burned witht heir men and their homes and their shops and their barns and their church = with everything animate and inanimate which makes city.
 COMMUNAL GRAVES
 Today there are three new graves in the small village come tery. They are communal graves, for only 52 of the 750 charred pieces of bodies left after the fires that could be identified.
 Save for these three new graves, Oradour- r-sur- -Glane today remains exactly as the human butchers left it six months ago. It will remain this way, for the French plan to put wall around the city and leave it forever a monument to German beStiality.
 To visit this ravaged village is all the more shocking because ot its contrast to the rich, fertile, rolling Limousin countryside which surrounds it. Not a house, not shop, not barn, not building in thhe entire village escaped. There are no roofs. All that is left is red and gray shadings of brick and the granite walls and half-WallS 1n varying tones of age and decay.
 I have sene many cities leveled by war. But none like this. Bombs and shells touch city with an ironist's hand: half a floor is blown away, butt he rest remains With piano miraculously balancing on the brink; a dinner remains on a table centering a wall-less room; picture stays hanging on a scrap of wall. an island of civilization 1n a sea of destruction.
 There is none of this here Oradour-sur-G -Glane was touched with the hand of butcher. The bones that are left of stores and houses were picked clean by the intense heat of incendiary gre-- nades and phosphorous bombs. All that remains of civilization are two signs: Hotel Mllord" and Cafe du Chene." They are on the main street, Rue Emile Desourteaux 1842-1906-named for the father of the villages mayor doctor. He perished too, with his sons and his family.
 JUST TWO SIGNS LEFT
 These two signs alone remain. These signs and, in the basementS. handful of such iron skeletons as withstood the whitening heat of the Nazi pyromaniacs' phosphorus firebrands. I n one house there is stove. In another, three bicycles. In third a bedstead and sewing machine. In the church there are some frames of what were once baby carriages.
 That is all, except silence-the powerful, ear-splitting silence of reverence which muffles the foot steps of pilgrims to Oradour. So it has been since 4 o'clock of that June Saturday afternoon. heard the story from Clement Brous- saudier, one of five men and one woman who escaped from the holocaust.
 The column of Germans, 200 strong, entered the city at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. They forced every one present, native or visitor, into the town square ito check identity papers" Then | they herded the women and chil- dren into the church for "protec- tion."
 They set the men to work in groups of 30 or 40 cleaning out the barns. Without warning, while the men were thus working, the Germans moved them down with machine guns. Then they covered the bodies with the barns contents and set all afire. Clement Brous- saudier played dead and managed to slip away.
 Meanwhile, in the church the Germans brought heaters" They