Videos. “The Legion of Honor, I didn’t want it…” When Geneviève Callerot told her story

In 2021, Geneviève Callerot participated in the documentary “We peasants”, broadcast by France 2. Presented as “one of the last witnesses” of the moments after the war of 14-18 when “it was necessary to rebuild everything and save the earth” , she recounted in particular: “The large properties were deserted, because all the men had been killed. We couldn't find people to come and work them. » Here again, she spoke of life, “survival” under the Occupation, and modestly of the role that she and her family had played in the Double: “We did what we could, that's all. People were in danger. We never asked them if they were Jewish, Chinese… They needed to pass, we let them pass. »

A few years earlier, in 2018, she was the star of the Canal Plus show “Clique Dimanche”. She had just published “Two girls under the boot, chronicle of a family under the Occupation” (PLB Éditeur) and received the Legion of Honor… which she had almost refused. “I didn’t want it, there are so many other people who deserve it more than me. After that, I thought about it and I told myself that I was going to take it, in the name of my parents,” she notably told Mouloud Achour, for this “Portrait of a Heroine”. A barefoot heroine, sitting on a low wall, very close to her land on which she spent almost all her life.