European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I did not start immediately as a witness.

Even though I was a member of the association of former resistance fighters, I had other political responsibilities.

I had joined the French Communist Party in 1943, when it was still clandestine,

I took on some political responsibilities on a local level.

I would attend the annual meetings of the former resistant fighters association, but was no active member.

Later, when the president of the association passed away,

friends of mine pushed me into the presidency saying:

“You were so active during the resistance; you were responsible for the liberation of Nanterre together with Louis Meunier, etc…”

To quote Bertolt Brecht: “the lap of the repulsive beast is still fertile”;

we had not and have not totally liberated ourselves from fascism.

Therefore we felt the need to inform and to act.

In school history books, there was very little information about the time:

General De Gaulle’s speech and the Shoah.

That is very important, but it is not enough to explain the complexity of World War II.

We were asked by history teachers to talk about our experience in class.

We thought it was important to do even more

and started organizing school trips to different memorials, the places where Nazi crimes were committed.

We organized school trips to Oradour s/Glane,

to Struthof, the only Nazi concentration camp there was in France, in Alsace.

We took classes of three different schools to Auschwitz-Birkenau.