In Montpellier in 1944, Noëlle Vincensini, Jeanne Breton, Josette Peyre, Paulette Bertholio then young resistant, were deported to Ravensbruck. The incredible fate of four war heroines.
With their charming smiles, their folds, their adjusted skirts and their buttoned blouses, nothing distinguishes them from other young girls. Jeanne, Josette, Paulette are students at the Normal school in Montpellier while Noëlle is still a high school student in Clémenceau.
These four friends have a common secret: they are part of the resistance: the first three for the secret army; Noëlle for FTP. In the streets of Montpellier, they distribute leaflets and transport goods.
She delivers weapons in the maquis
Noëlle sometimes even delivers weapons in the Cévenol maquis, in Narbonne and Nîmes. “One day, when she was 16 years old, she took the train with a suitcase in which weapons were hidden. As she was heavy, an SS helped her set up her luggage in the wagon”tells her daughter Elsa Chabrol.
With his group of resistance fighters, they are used to finding themselves near the arches. This spring 1944, while thirty, united in all discretion, they were arrested by the Gestapo. His friends are subject to the same fate in a Villa Quartier des Aubes. Noëlle must be sentenced to death.
The aunt of Noëlle, Pétainiste, with whom she lives (!) And who kicked her out when she discovered her activities, still goes to see the police and explains to them that her niece is the youngest in the group, than 'She doesn't know what she is doing and we have to release her.
The prisoners also move from such a death sentence of such a young girl. Noëlle is tortured. In front of his mutilated body, the soldier SS launches: “Nothing to do with the kid. It's a hard”.
-A box of sugars that will change everything
It escapes the execution but is deported to Ravensbruck. Threw into a cattle wagon, its destination towards the horror of Ravensbruck lasts three days and four nights. After months of terror, hunger and cold, in the spring, Noëlle and her friends escape the death march. The four adolescent girls who are nothing more than emaciated figures and emaciated faces manage to escape to an abandoned farm. A box of sugars thrown by a German column gave them the strength to flee in their despair.
A year later, Noëlle, Josette, Jeanne and Paulette returned to Montpellier. Their smile has disappeared from their faces and their bodies are only or injuries. All four are silent this tragic episode of their existence. “My mother said nothing for decades because she was afraid that she was not believed. She thought nobody could understand what had happened to her”racketal coël spoutin Vincensini.
She will wait to be 70 to speak
At the age of 70, she finally managed to put words on the unspeakable and write a piece of sugar, a book in which she tells this painful past by “Duty of memory”. Jeanne Bonton and Josette Peyre also made a story of their lives from resistant and deportees on a certain trip. Precious testimonies which say the inhumanity but also the courage of these young Montpellier for freedom.
Noëlle continued to lead a fighting life. Married to the writer Cévenol Jean-Pierre Chabrol then divorced, she fought for anti-racism, against electoral fraud in Corsica, her native island, created the first free radio in France … Her daughter tells: “She has always been concerned with the other, she has always been very attached to social justice”. Today, at 108, the fighter can no longer act but she has changed heroin definitively. Just like Jeanne, Josette and Paulette.
“The Morceau set of sucy and other regits” de noëlle Vincenensini, Extivary Albiana. 13 Euros. “A certain voyage, to the self-port.
La Sétoise Suzanne Pic
Suzanne Pic, 17 years old: Ravensbrück, number 43155; Rasag -Leipzig Matricule 4046. Suzanne was deported when she was 17 years old. She was born in Sète and it was in Macon (where her father, tax controller, was transferred) that she engaged in resistance alongside her mother and brother. On May 21, 1944, she was arrested, on denunciation, with her mother and a friend of her brother, and interned in the citadel of Perpignan where she suffered a violent interrogation. She is then deported to Ravensbrück. Subsequently, it is assigned to forced work in a Kommando of Rasag-Leipzig, a arms factory which depends on the Buchenwald camp. During the night of April 13, 1945, the SS emptied the camp due to the progression of the Allied troops and it underwent the death marches. On May 18, 1945, she was released with her mother. She is just 18 years old, and has bone tuberculosis. She marries and becomes Suzanne Orts. She died on February 21, 2018 in Aix-en-Provence.
