Seventy-nine years old. On May 8, 1945, the Allies celebrated their victory over this obscurantism which was one of the darkest periods in the history of Humanity.
In front of the war memorial on the church square in Montceau-les-Mines, the words of the mayor bear witness to the horror of war, recalling the 60 million deaths during a single conflict. “The living can no longer teach the dead anything, but the dead teach the living.”
This victory of May 8 is first and foremost that of millions of fighters driven by power, duty, the possibility and the requirement to fight and resist. “These soldiers from all over the world, these soldiers of France, these civilians, women and men who understood that if you want to obtain something that you have never had, you have to try something that you have never done” explains Marie-Claude Jarrot.
May 8, 1945, was a victory for women and men from different backgrounds determined to join forces, to come together to defend common ideals of freedom, equality, justice and dignity against Nazism and its barbarity.
“When Jeannette, not far from the town hall of Montceau, recounts that she saw her father cry while going into battle with the same teenage tears that she shed when seeing many years later, the images archives of de Gaulle going up the Champs Elysées for the liberation of Paris, there is this dignity” shares the mayor.
There was May 8 but everything did not stop there. We had to climb back up. “France had to rebuild itself and there was a lot to do.”
Because beyond the victory, let us salute the courage of the resistance fighters of France, “the resistance fighters of the Mining Basin, the resistance fighters of Montceau-les-Mines. Montceau the courage, Montceau the battles, Montceau the dead killed in battle. Montceau the resistant miners. Montceau the reckless. Montceau war widows. Montceau, the children of the homeland,” lists Marie-Claude Jarrot. She cites the courage of Yvonne Lachaume, one of the first active women in the resistance, victim of her commitment, born December 17, 1912 in Montceau, orphaned at six years old, resistant from the start of the war alongside her husband and who, according to the book of the Auschwitz dead, lost his life on February 24, 1943.
“This is what obliges us today because if our elders, who after winning the war knew how to build peace and bring the French together, there can be no question, by fanatics and furious people, that France is devastated again”, details the mayor who adds, “we must also fight the detractors of the European path which was the only possible one for the reconciliation of nations, shaped by the dreams of several successive generations and which remains that of hope in the collective progress, that of the refusal of nationalism. Europe is nothing without France’s visceral attachment to human dignity and fundamental rights.
Balzac said: “On election day, I will be whatever I need to be.”
“That is to say a Montcellian. French and European” declares Marie-Claude Jarrot.
J.B.
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