cover image Martyred Village

Martyred Village

Sarah Farmer. University of California Press, $50 (317pp) ISBN 978-0-520-21186-5

In June 1944, Nazi troops in the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane massacred more than 600 men, women and children and torched the town. Today, the town's ruins remain as a national monument, yet the meaning of what happened there has changed over time, as the French have struggled to come to terms with the legacy of WWII. Farmer, a history professor at the University of Iowa, published a version of this book in French four years ago; her firsthand knowledge of the site and survivors of the massacre (""historians of their own experience"") give the book an emotional punch. Farmer starts with an account of the town's destruction, then describes how Oradour became the premier symbol of French innocence destroyed by Nazi brutality. By the 1950s, however, when 21 soldiers who participated in the massacre were put on trial and ultimately pardoned, the war years no longer appeared so black and white. Of the 21 soldiers, 14 were French from Alsace, and unlike surviving citizens of Oradour, the French government was more concerned with forgetting collaborators than with memorializing victims. Farmer has a fine eye for irony, pointing out ""the enormous difficulty and expense of trying to maintain a ruin in a ruined state."" While the book does a fine job of summarizing France's postwar political infighting, the best moments are more personal: interviews with people who describe growing up in the tragic shadow of the old town, descriptions of the present-day ruins and meditations on the nature of memory. 26 b&w photos. (Dec.)