On Saturday, June 10, 1944, four days after Allied Forces landed on the beaches in Normandy, beginning the liberation of Europe, and while locals went about their business, Nazis from the 2nd Waffen-SS, an armored division, arrived without warning and sealed off the village. Starting in mid-afternoon, residents were rounded up, herded to the market square and separated by gender. Men were corralled into barns and other large spaces and machine-gunned; shots were aimed first at their legs to prohibit escape. Women and children were taken to the church and locked inside. A device was lit that caused suffocating smoke; the church was then barraged with hand grenades and set on fire. Later, the soldiers ransacked the village, set fires and used dynamite to maximize destruction. By eight in the evening, the German soldiers withdrew from the smoking ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane. Only six men and one woman survived the carnage.

After the war, Charles de Gaulle, with consensus from the French government, ordered that the “martyred village,” as it is called, remain shattered and charred as a painful reminder of the brutality of war. Oradour-sur-Glane has been labeled a historical monument since 1946.

A sign directed us to the car park. It was not crowded, and as we walked to the Centre de la Mémoire we looked toward where we had first glimpsed the ruins in a macabre attempt to see more than the tops of walls, but nothing else was visible; visitors must follow a prescribed route in order to experience the village. Along the way to the entrance is a tall column constructed of rough-hewn cubes of stone topped by a statue of a naked woman emerging from flames, her arms flailing upward in anguish. On the column is a line from poet, Paul Eluard: Ici / Des hommes / firent à leur mère / Et à toutes les femmes la plus grave / injure / Ils n’épargnèrent pas les enfants. (Here, men have made their mothers and all women the most serious insult: they did not spare the children.)

The Memory Center of Oradour-sur-Glane comes into view as a series of angled, irregular, rust-colored slabs thrusting up from the earth. The center’s website describes the design for the Memory Center as “non-architecture.” As you walk toward it, the peaceful, verdant surroundings of the Glane Valley disguise its purpose. But upon approach, the blade-like slabs purposefully rupture the scenery and the epithet “village martyr” appears on the entrance.

Visitors descend into the building which is sparse and utilitarian. There is a room off of the main space, a theater for informative films about the site. Upon entering, we were startled by a wall of black-and-white photographs of the 642 men, women and children who were massacred at Oradour-sur-Glane. Each minute or so an enlargement of one of the photographs appeared on a screen and then dissolved into another and then another, while names were spoken in a continuous, somber cadence. The faces and names of babies, children, teens and adults, individuals in every stage of life, forced us to confront human connections to an historic event.

In a room adjoining the wall of photographs, scrapbooks were assembled alphabetically by family with materials and photos painstakingly collected and catalogued to convey the loss of homes, businesses, religious lives, careers, interests, personalities and voices. We turned the pages, looking into the eyes of the school teacher and the doctor, smiling at the faces of children peering over a balcony at a family gathering, recognizing the affection of a family for its dog, and feeling the joy of sweethearts on their wedding day. Through the photographs we pieced together a scene of village life like those we had seen in so many old films. The church, bakery, café, clothing store, other businesses and private homes became backdrops for people smiling and posing and walking by, revealing a vital community where life went on despite the war. Images of intimacy suggested passages that resonate in all societies. These were cherished moments meant to be looked at again and again in albums filled with the chronology of family. Today they were a preface for travelers about to journey through a moment of savagery.

Visitors emerge from the austere, underground Memory Center into natural light and into the present. Passing a sign that declares “Souviens-Toi” and “Remember,” we walked the streets of Oradour-sur-Glane.

Sidewalks and roads and intersections declare that this village was planned and grew over time with commerce and life, but crumbled walls and rubble reveal a community long dead. We had anticipated the desolation and the ruins; we had even envisioned some specific remains from photographs. What we could not foresee, however, was our own emotional response. Rather than being transfixed solely by the material remnants of a village frozen in time since 1944, we felt our senses stunned by the horrific impact of life unexpectedly and instantly extinguished.

Throughout the occupation the Nazis maintained a precarious relationship with the puppet government in Vichy in an effort to control the civilian population. But the destruction of Oradour and its citizens was so barbaric that the German military realized it had to do something to deflect blame and suppress public outrage. Within days, in response to a protest from Vichy, the German military put together a document that accused the villagers of initiating the fight and blamed the deaths of the women and children in the church on an explosion of hidden ammunition kept by the villagers. They also ordered a perfunctory criminal investigation. The massacre was brought up at the Nuremburg trials, and in 1953 it was the sole focus of a military tribunal at Bordeaux. Neither of these investigations resulted in decisive understanding of the event. To this day, no definitive evidence exists as to why the SS attacked the village, but there are theories.

Systematic attacks upon civilians as a way to maintain order in occupied countries was an inherent Nazi strategy. This was regular practice in the Eastern Front, and as the war continued, violence against civilians became more common in France. After the Allies landed at Normandy, efforts by the French Resistance to disrupt German supply lines and communications increased. In response, orders were issued by the German military to crush the resistance without mercy. The resistance was particularly active around Clermont-Ferrand and the department of Corrèze, not far from Oradour-sur-Glane. Tactics of the resistance included attacks on troops and kidnapping. On June 9th, the day before the Oradour massacre, ninety-nine men were hanged in Tulle, capital of Corrèze, as punishment for partisan harassment of the Nazi 2nd SS division as it made its way north toward Normandy. It was this same division that annihilated Oradour-sur-Glane the following day.

An audio tour can be rented at the Memory Center, but we chose to walk the streets of Oradour on our own and construct a narrative from the simple plaques that identify businesses and their proprietors and homes and their residents. Each step reveals objects that support life; the remnants of tables, bed frames, bicycles and cars are wedged within the rubble of collapsed buildings. Buckets and rusted sewing machines sit in extant frames of windows or niches. Irregular, partially standing walls give testament to the bombardment of the village by the Nazis following the murders. Places that enrich and nurture a citizenry are ravaged. The roofless offices of the doctor and dentist, the wine shop, a girl’s school, an iron forge and the boulangerie are fragments of dirt and stone. The outline of a café has a single outdoor table; the automobile repair garage still has the frame of a door large enough for a truck, but no walls or roof to enclose it. Each vestige of life rests useless amid the disarray of charred stone and wreckage. Weeds push up beneath the rust and rubble of seventy years. Flowers bloom through as well. As we roamed the streets with other visitors, the uniformity of silence was remarkable. This is not a place for conversation or expletive even though each step leads to palpable savagery.

The main street meanders through the town past the market place, barns, fields, residences. It opens to side streets but eventually everyone takes a road that leads to the church. If a visitor expects solace, some divine absolution from this site, it does not come. A rusted baby carriage in the barren, roofless nave of the church is a reminder that the youngest victim murdered and burned was eight days old. The symmetry of the marble altar could be lovely as a relic aging naturally over time. Instead, the image of Christ that adorns it, rendered faceless by bombardment, and the empty rectangle of its tabernacle are reminders of congregants whose desperation and wails filled this cavernous room on June 10, 1944. Perhaps there are prayers uttered by visitors but they too are silent. Silence punctuates Oradour-sur-Glane.

A great deal of material exists about the destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane. Research has examined assertions that the village was a storehouse of armaments and that it harbored resistance fighters; information reveals that a number of Jews were among the dead. After the war a few Nazi soldiers were investigated for their part in the massacre, but only one was held accountable. As recently as 2013 Germany started a new investigation to locate soldiers who might have been involved. That same year German President Joachim Gauck stood with French President François Hollande to acknowledge the atrocity.

Photos, documents and maps can be accessed with ease, and the question “why” goes unanswered. But the significance of Oradour-sur-Glane is found in its very existence and in the power of its empty streets to elicit profound questions about humanity. As objects eventually rust beyond recognition, and rubble is eroded by nature, the village will survive the decay and abide the silence of visitors. And in its admonishment—“Souviens-toi,” “Remember”—Oradour-sur-Glane will continue to remind us to remember and to be vigilant.

Text by Elizabeth Esris
Photos by Michael Esris

For practical information about Oradour and surroundings
The Memory Center at Oradour-sur-Glane, L’Auze, 87520 Oradour-sur-Glane. Tel. 05 55 43 34 30.
Situating Oradour: Oradour is located 14 miles northwest of Limoges in the department of Haute-Vienne, one of three departments in the historic region of Limousin, itself now a part of the vast region of New Aquitaine.

The post The Silence of Oradour-sur-Glane appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

Urbanites in France often speak of Creuse, a region deep into the often bypassed center of the country, as the kind of place to which you might flee to escape the rat race and surround yourself with goats and sheep, the proverbial middle of nowhere.

France Revisited takes pleasure in revealing the somewhere of such nowheres, and there is nowhere more somewhere in Creuse than the small town of Aubusson, world famous for its 500 years of tapestry-making.

Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie Aubusson

The Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie Aubusson (International Center of Aubusson Tapestry), which opened in July 2016, represents far more than a pat on the back to the history of tapestry-making in the region. It also reaffirms and encourages the continuity of know-how for the entire branch of tapestry-related activities present in Creuse, from the raising of sheep and the spinning and dying of wool to the creation of images and their weaving into an extraordinary array of contemporary tapestries.

The Cité is at once a museum, an institution for the transmission of know-how, a research center, a start-up incubator for related businesses and a platform for the promotion and creation of contemporary tapestries.

Taking the relay from an older, smaller museum, the Cité project was in the works for over 20 years, but truly began to take shape in 2009 when Aubusson tapestry-making gained entry onto UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

As a museum, the Cité displays examples of tapestries since the 15th century, including a dramatic presentation of works through the ages presented in a series of theatrical decors. The techniques of tapestry-making and their use around the world are also presented. And 12 weavers (lissiers in French) are admitted every two years to the Cité’s two-year program for budding weavers. Also, State-owned tapestries are now restored here.

Weavers, les lissiers

Visiting the Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie Aubusson is one of the rewards of a detour into the middle of the somewhere of Creuse. And enhancing that rewards is the possibility to meet individuals who carry and transmit the know-how associated with the creation of Aubusson tapestries.

Since 2010, the Cité has supported the work of regional artisans in the development of contemporary creations. Each year it calls on artists from around the world to present projects according to a given theme. The three selected projects are then woven in Creuse. In order to be considered an Aubusson a tapestry needn’t be woven in the town itself but anywhere within Creuse. The two main centers of creation, however, are Aubusson and Felletin.

France-Odile Perrin-Crinière in Aubusson

In 2015 France-Odile Perrin-Crinière’s workshop-gallery A2, located in the center of Aubusson, received a commission from the Cité to weave a richly colored 3m x 5m (about 9.8ft x 16.4ft) tapestry called “The Family in the Joyful Greenery” based on an image by Argentinian artists Leo Chiachio and Daniel Giannone.

Enter Perrin-Crinière’s workshop-gallery and you’ll see two (or three if she, too, has her hands on the wool) highly-skilled artisans leaning over a long horizontal loom. They work with patience, skill and comradery before a web of yarns, knots and colors—300 nuances in all. They’ve been at it for over 18 months now, and the tapestry is expected to “fall” from the loom in another six month (spring 2017). They weave without even seeing the actual face of the tapestry since a tapestry is woven from its back.

Perrin-Crinière’s route to becoming the master artisan at the helm of a well-established little workshop began in 1978 when, at the age of 16, she left her home in the Landes region of southwest France to learn tapestry-making at Aubusson. After three years of schooled training followed by several years honing her skills working for others, she struck out on her own as a creator-weaver, meaning that in addition to following the designs of others she would weave her own designs. In 2010 she partnered with another weaver to create the workshop A2. The unexpected early retirement of her partner left Perrin-Crinière alone at A2 just as the major commission from the Cité arrived.

In need of employees she turned to the two-year formal training program run by the Cité. She hired two weavers whose entrance into the field was quite different from her own.

Patricia Bergeron, a Creuse native, had a long career assisting the elderly before undertaking a professional reconversion to become a weaver. “Ever since I was little I’ve worked with my fingers,” she says. “I did embroidery and knitting, without thinking that I’d eventually turn to working in a workshop like this.”

Aubusson’s international reputation meant that Aiko Konomi knew of Aubusson tapestries in her native Japan, where she received a master’s degree in contemporary art fabrics. She arrived in 2014 to study in the Cité’s program. For financial reasons and because of her prior experience working towards her master’s degree, she only completed one year of the program before Perrin-Crinière hired her. Bergeron and Konomi now work daily on the commissioned tapestry while Perrin-Crinière puts in time here and there between weaving smaller orders on other looms and running workshops.

A2 has now earned the label Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant (Living Heritage Company, or EPV), a distinction given by the French State in recognition of excellence in traditional and industrial skills.

While working on this major commission as an artisan at the service of art (artisan d’art), Perrin-Crinière continues to create and execute her own designs in which she marries color and material, such as a tapestry framed by slate (e.g. the work behind her in the photo above).

Catherine Bernet in Felletin

A pretty 10-kilometer (6-mile) drive south through the wooded valley from Aubusson, leads to Felletin, a small town of 1800 inhabitants, less than half the size of Aubusson. If Aubusson is France’s tapestry capital, Felletin is its cradle since tapestry work has been documented here since the middle of the 15th century, even before Aubusson. More than 500 years later, Felletin remains a force in the Aubusson tapestry industry. The tennis-court size tapestry at Coventry Cathedral, designed by the British artist Graham Sutherland and completed in 1962, was made on a single loom in Felletin by Pinton, one of the largest manufacturers in the region.

As Perrin-Crinière passed the half-way mark of her commissioned tapestry at A2, the Cité’s commission to Catherine Bernet and her Atelier Bernet was falling from its loom after two years of weaving. (A tapestry “falls” from the loom when the weaving is complete.) For the first time Bernet could see the full 2m x 8m (6.6ft x 26.2ft) tapestry face up. But no sooner had its fall from the loom been celebrated then the tapestry was turned over again so that she could set to work bunching and cutting the pompoms on the back.

The tapestry is the door-rug intended to be partially hung, partially laid flat (see photo) in the lobby of the Cité Internationale. The image for tapesry, officially title “Toute personne 2 – Tissage métissage,” was created by Vincent Bécheau and Marie-Laure Bourgeois, architect-designers from Dordogne who, Bernet says, “actively participated without hindering the work.”

Both Bernet and Perrin-Criniere speak of the “relation of confidence” between the weaver and the artist-cartoonist. (The image that a tapestry is based on is called a cartoon, carton in French.) “A tapestry is necessarily a collaborative work, a dialogue between the two,” says Bernet.

Bruno Ythier, curator of the Cité, says that while weavers may be creators of the images for the tapestries they create, Aubusson largely represents an encounter between the image’s creator (an artist, a decorator, an architect or another) and the weaver who then interprets that image.

Bernet’s workshop in an attic partially bathed in natural light in a house near the center of Felletin. She works with two employees, one a young weaver whom she employed freshly graduated from the Cité weaving program, the other a weaver with 35 years of experience.

Originally from nearby Auvergne, Bernet came to tapestry-making in 2010, at the age of 34, having begun her professional career as a pharmacist. “In my free time I did a lot of painting and sculpting, but it was impossible to include my artistic side into my professional life,” she says.

She discovered tapestry-making “a little by chance” and, after giving that discovery time to mature in her mind, she crossed the border from Auvergne to Creuse and from pharmacy to craftsmanship.

Instead of seeking to enter Cité’s program, she apprenticed directly within with the Pinton workshop in order to better understand “the reality of the work.” “Having left my previous work, I couldn’t afford to make a mistake,” she says, “so I wanted to go directly to the heart of the matter to see if it was for me or not.”

It was.

In 2013 she set up her own shop. No sooner had she hung out her shingle then she sought and received the commission from the Cité to weave the door-rug which now prominently stands-lies in its lobby.

Asked if he ever misses her work as a pharmacist Bernet says, “There’s great joy [in being a lissière] but it also demands a lot in terms of time and energy. It’s a complete investment. But no regrets.”

Tapestry for the centennial of WWI

Weavers can also been seen at work in the Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie Aubusson itself. The inaugural on-site project, currently underway, is a tapestry for the centennial of the First World War.

Woven by the workshop of Patrick Guillot, it is based on an image entitled Pieta for World War I by the German artist Thomas Bayrle. Measuring 4.5m x 4.5m (14.7ft x 14.7ft) and consisting of thousands of skulls, the pieta is being woven on a loom that has been specially installed for the project in the Cité. The tapestry will eventually be displayed at the Historial Franco-Allemand of Hartmannswillerkopf in Alsace, a French-German WWI museum to be inaugurated on Nov. 11, Armistice Day, 2017.

The Terrade spinning and dyeing company

Not all wool that that goes into Aubusson tapestries comes from sheep raised in Creuse. Furthermore, all manner of fiber and fabrics may be used in Aubusson tapestries: alpaca, camel, bamboo, synthetics, etc. Nevertheless, those in search of local tradition might drive down by the narrow Creuse River as it flows out of Felletin toward Aubusson, there to visit Filature Terrade, a spinning and dyeing business that has been run by the Terrade family for over a century. Filature Terrade has also recently received the national label Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant (Living Heritage Company, or EPV).

Until 1950 the factory produced woolen cloth for shepherd’s capes before transforming into a spinning factory for wool and dying, primarily of sheep’s wool, using natural dyes. It is a small factory by industry standards, producing about 20 tons per year. It allows for a fascinating and personable introduction to spinning and dying. (Visits are organized by a local association; see information below.) Now operated by the third (Michel) and fourth (Thierry) generation of the founding Terrade family, the factory produces customized yarn for professionals. A small boutique on the site is open to the public and has excellent factory prices on wool yarn and knit products.

Practical Information and Contacts

See websites for opening times and entrance fee.

Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie Aubusson
Rue des Arts
23200 Aubusson
Tel. 05 55 66 66 66

Musée des Cartons de Tapisserie d’Aubusson
The images that weavers follow and interpret in creating tapestries are known as cartoons, cartons in France. This one-of-a-kind museum along the Creuse River as it flows through Aubusson present an exceptional collection of historic cartoon. It can only be visited on a guided tour, which is available in English.
Pont de la Terrade
1 rue de l’Abreuvoir
23200 Aubusson
Tel. 06 88 25 35 07

Filature Terrade (spinning and dying factory)
Rue de la Papeterie
23500 Felletin
Tel. 05 55 66 44 88
Don’t just stop by. Factory tours are organized by the association Felletin Patrimoine-Environement. The association (felletinpatrimoine@gmail.com) or the Felletin Tourist Office can provide further information about tapestry-related visits at Filature Terrade and elsewhere in and around the Felletin.

Hôtel de France
A charming and old-fashion 3-star hotel and restaurant in the center of Aubusson, amiably operated by René Jean Hawaï.
6 rue des Déportés
23200 Aubusson
Tel. 05 55 66 10 22

Aubusson Tourist Office
63 rue Vieille
23200 Aubusson
Tel. 05 55 66 32 12

Felletin Tourist Office
Place Quinault
23500 Felletin
Tel. 05 55 64 54 60
An annual exhibition of tapestries in the Gothic chapel at the center of town. In late October Felletin organizes National Wool Days (Journées Nationales de la Laine) http://journeesdelalaine.wixsite.com/felletin devoted to all aspects of the use and production of wool, from shearing to yarn to finished goods.

Information about Aubusson is available in Felletin and vice versa. Information about the overall Creuse region can be found at www.tourisme-creuse.com.

© 2016, Gary Lee Kraut

An earlier version of this article first appeared in The Connexion.

The post Aubusson Tapestries: Weavers, Spinners, Dyers, Cartoonists and the Cité Internationale appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.