Always in accordance with regional events, the Ciné-Saire association had to offer an evening on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Landing. Friday June 14, 2024, the Réville cinema (Manche) welcomed nearly a hundred spectators for the screening of the film: Women in the Shadows, which honored the women who worked during the Second World War as resistance fighters. . If the film received all the votes, the debate which followed kept the spectators in suspense. “We wanted to mark this 80e. We are a region affected by this event and the population is attached to it,” underlines Brigitte Hautemanière, vice-president of the association.
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The organizers had invited Jeanne-Louise and Lise Lecostey, daughter and granddaughter of Marie-Louise Coupey, a resistance fighter from Gonneville. “My mother was town hall secretary in Gonneville. In 1942, she was contacted by the leader of the Delbo-Phenix resistance network. She was 23 years old. » A recruitment which was not insignificant, given the numerous German activities around Gonneville, which interested the allies in view of the Landing. “She was a town hall secretary and knew the movements around the airport and the V1 launch pads in Mesnil-au-Val,” continues her daughter. Cannons and the like were also installed around the airport.
She didn’t talk about it
“If there are things that characterize mom, it’s courage and tenacity,” assures Jeanne-Louise Lecostey, who evokes the arrest and imprisonment of her mother, arrested by the Gestapo on January 29, 1944, for a few minutes before her marriage. Denounced by a prisoner who had been tortured, Marie-Louise Coupey was then sent to the Parisian prison of Fresnes. “She was interrogated and tortured there before being imprisoned,” declares her daughter.
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Released in March 1944, the resistance fighter, according to her daughter, remained marked by this tormented passage in her life. “It was too hard for her to talk about. Sometimes, she spoke of the tortures that other prisoners suffered without mentioning those they suffered, insists Jeanne-Louise Lecostey. She told us one day that she had been beaten in Fresnes prison but she never wanted to go further into the memories, for fear of reliving those moments morally or out of modesty. » And the girl and the little girl conclude. “If some people refuse to believe certain testimonies, they should stop hiding their faces. »
