A girl who survived an SS death squad in the Belgian Ardenne was unable to recall little but the name of a friend. Sixty years on, she has been reunited with that friend, Now living in the North-East. Gavin Engelbrecht reports.

It was nothing short of a miracle that three-year-old Marcelle Bedeux survived the Nazi massacre - found among two dozen bodies of people machine-gunned down in a shed.

After the atrocity, only days before Christmas 60 years ago, Marcelle could not recall anything that had happened or remember much about her parents.

But one name remained fixed in her mind - that of Leny, an older girl who had been her friend.

So when documentary makers spoke to her about fateful day, in the village of Pafondruy, Belgium, she mentioned her yearning to meet Leny again.

It was this that led to Leny Bowring being traced to the village of Hamsterley Mill, County Dur-ham.

On the 60th anniversary of the shooting, Mrs Bowring, 69, described her luck at missing by two days the attack in which her grandparents died - and of her emotional reunion with Mrs Bedeux, 63.

She said: "My parents, who lived in Brussels, had sent me to my grandparents to escape the danger of V1 bombs.

"When the Battle of Ardenne broke out, my parents, who used to come and visit me at weekends, came to pick me up.

"But my grandfather insisted on staying. My last memory is of my grandmother standing in the doorway crying.

"I can vividly remember us fleeing down lanes through the woods behind the American lines. Our car was running on black market petrol and kept breaking down."

German SS troops of Colonel Joachim Peiper's 1st SS Panzer Division went on a murderous spree, killing hundreds of civilians in the Stavelot area, including Mrs Bowring's grandparents and 22 others, who were herded into a shed and gunned down in the village of Parfondruy.

Mrs Bowring said: "My mother went back to discover her parents had been shot. She never returned to the farm again."

She added: "I always remember having played with little Marcelle. She was like a doll to me.

"I learned she had escaped, but never knew what had happened to her - and even less thought she would have kept my name in her mind."

After the war, Leny met her husband, Peter, after becoming a penpal of his sister. The couple set up home in England. After a long career as a teacher, she retired to Hamsterley Mill, near Consett, where few of her neighbours knew of her remarkable past.

Mrs Bowring got a telephone call out of the blue. She said: "The caller told me to go back 60 years and asked if the name Marcelle meant anything to me. Tears just flowed down my face. It was such a shock."

The producers making a film on the Battle of the Bulge arranged a reunion on the road leading to the scene of the massacre. Neither of the women had been back and, ironically, it was a German cameraman who captured the scene.

Mrs Bowring said: "I am just sad I cannot remember her mother, so that I could tell her something about her."

Mrs Bowring went to Belgium to see the premier of Leny: Life after Death.

She said: "It was harrowing seeing the burned bodies. I just don't know how men could put people against a wall and shoot them."

She added: "I have never felt any hatred toward Germans. But seeing footage of those who could have been the culprits swaggering around . . . so arrogant . . . that incensed me.

"Nobody was ever found guilty because it was impossible to find out who did what."

In an unpleasant postscript, Belgian police last week intercepted a group of Germans dressed in SS uniforms on the anniversary of the horror in Stavelot, where they had intended holding speeches.

The documentary was renamed That Winter in the Ardennes for showing on German television, on Christmas Eve.