Oradour-sur-Glane Presbytery
The presbytery, or presbyterie, is where
the local priests lived. Also known as the rectory, it is located
right next to the church. There was no Protestant church in the
village.
The Presbytery is shown on the left side
of the photo above. On the right side is the exterior wall of
the nave of the church. The only survivor of the massacre in
the church, Madame Marguerite Rouffanche, jumped from the center
window, which is 9 feet from the ground. The ground under the
window slants down to a retaining wall that is around ten feet
high. She did not jump off this wall, but rather crawled around
the presbytery to the garden behind it.
SS soldiers fired machine-guns at her
and another woman, who had also jumped from the window, after
throwing her baby out for Madame Rouffance to catch. Madame Rouffanche
was hit four times in the legs and once in the shoulder, but
she managed to crawl along the side of the Presbytery, shown
on the left in the photo above. The other woman and her baby
were mortally wounded by the shots. Their bodies were later buried
by the soldiers who did not find Madame Rouffanche; she had crawled
around the corner of the presbytery and into the garden shown
in the photo below.
The photo above shows the Presbytery
garden where Madame Rouffanche hid among the rows of peas, covering
herself with dirt. She remained there until she was rescued at
5 p.m. the next day. The wall of the presbytery is shown in the
background of the photo.
There were two priests and a seminary
student living in the presbytery. The priests were Jean-Baptiste
Chapelle and Jacques Lorich, both of whom were killed in the
massacre. The seminary student was a 21-year-old Alsatian named
Neumeyer who was a refugee from Schiltigheim, a suburb of Strasbourg.
Some of the SS soldiers who perpetrated the massacre were also
Alsatians from Schiltigheim who had been drafted into the German
army. The bodies of the priests and the student were never identified,
so it is unknown if they died in the church or at one of the
other killing sites.
The road that goes past the church and
the presbytery, shown in the photo above, is the road where the
SS soldiers entered the town, traveling north past the church
to the upper town at the far end of Rue de Emile Desourteaux.
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