Oradour - a personal response

[Severn Bore]

Congratulations on a very moving slide show.

I visited Oradour on an early summer's day some years ago. Although the sun was shining and the vegetation blossoming colourfully, it could not disguise the terrible events that occurred there so many years ago. The memorials with pictures of the massacred was especially poignant and I still clearly remeber seeing those featured in your tribute.

If it is possible for people to visit Oradour, they should do so and stand in the village square or visit the church where so many people were locked in and burnt alive. Visit the museum on site and see the pathetic personal objects still bearing the scars of that day. The walls still bear the scars of the bullets which killed groups of the village men who were rounded up and summarily executed.

That war is now long past, but such atrocities still occur around the world. At Oradour we are exhorted to remember - Souviens toi - but unfortunately we seem reluctant to learn.

[liebgott]

If I may add my small comments on a very moving presentation--we just returned from a visit to the beaches of Normandy--one day after D-Day to pay tribute to the Canadian troups who fell amongst all the other allied forces. Our guide was most poignant in relating the events in all the villages around us. When I returned and viewed the presentation, I must admit having tears in my eyes. The local people still remember every bit of what happened and we were pleased to come to lay wreaths on graves in tribute to those gallant troups who saved the free world for us to grow up in.

Many thanks for the presentation. Not only was it excellent but it has great value for people who forget what war is really like.

Barbara

[hotmetal]

A wonderful and moving presentation,

'least we forget'

Alan

[tkimages]

Thank you all for the kind comments, it would appear that the show has had the desired effect.

Tillman

[dagrace]

Well done. I'm sure I'll have more to say after I've seen it a couple more times.

[Robert]

Tillman you should enter your Pte show in super circuit festival in France

go to http://www.diaporamacircuit.com/

if you have problem to read french let me know I will help you to do the necessary to enter

in my opinion your Pte show Oradour should be present in the next diaporama festival in France .

Regards

Robert

[Marianne]

Hello Tilman,

I downloaded your show and am very much impressed. I keep some of the PTE shows of others on my harddisk to get inspiration or just because I want to remember myself at the level I one day want to achieve

I put yours next to Barry's Black Country which still is my all time favorite.

A few questions though:

Did you take all the photographs in landscape? Or did you crop the standing ones afterwards?

And how on earth did you manage to get them all in the same (very beautiful) color? Photoshop for sure, but by what method and are you willing to give the colorcode away? (Better to have a good copy than a bad original )

Anyway, I advise everybody strongly to take the time to download Oradour. I looked for some more information on the Internet and found a couple of sites, one even in Dutch. It is a long drive from the middle of Holland to the south of France, but one day I'll get there. That's for sure

Marianne

[Stuart]

I'd like to echo Tillman's thanks. We both knew that Oradour was a very moving location with an important story to be told. By working together we feel that we've had a measure of success in telling the tale of a village that prior to our visit - occasioned by reading a brief paragraph in the Rough Guide to France - we knew nothing about. Through the medium of photography and AV we've been successful in allowing more people to become aware of the dreadful deed that was done.

Many thanks for your kind words and appreciation. Such positive responses are most encouraging.

Stuart

[Esc]

FRANKFURT, Germany: Heinz Barth, a former SS officer convicted of involvement in the massacre of an entire village in Nazi-occupied France, has died, a priest in the town where he lived said Tuesday. He was 86.

Barth died of cancer in the past few days, said Heinz-Dieter Schmidtke, the parish priest in Gransee, north of Berlin. He could not provide the exact date of Barth's death and did not say where he died.

In 1983, a court in East Berlin convicted Barth and sentenced him to life in prison for his role in the slaughter of villagers in Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944.

These news came the other day. The PtE-show Oradour - a personal response is what got me going in PtE a few years ago. Although the new version of PtE have a lot of extras and fancy tools "Oradour" shows how much could be done with 4.48.

It´s not always fancy tools that makes up a good and impressive show.

It might be long overdue but - Thanks a lot for get me going in PtE.

/Esc

[alrobin]

Esc,

Thanks for reminding us of this excellent and very moving show, and for bringing this news item to our attention.

I dug back in my archived slideshows today and watched over again Tilman Kleinhans' masterpiece, with its sharp, de-saturated, sepia-toned images, with just a hint of accent colour here and there, and was just as impressed and moved by it as the first time I saw it, about 2 years ago.

I first heard about this ghastly incident of the 2nd World War which occurred at Oradour-sur-Glane in France, through this award-winning AV sequence, and it is just as poignant today as it was then.

Tilman, if you are reading this, it might be appropriate to post your AV again for the benefit of all the newcomers to PTE who have not had the opportunity to see it. After all, it's all about "lest we forget", or as the French so succinctly put it, "souviens toi".

Note:

I just realized that this sequence is still available on page 9 of Beechbrook - well worth downloading if one hasn't done so already.