A day to remember. Emmanuel Macron spoke on Sunday with four elders of the Izieu house, where 44 Jewish children were rounded up by the Gestapo in April 1944, after commemorating the fighting on the Glières plateau, launching a long memorial cycle to mark the 80th anniversary of the Liberation.
At the end of the morning, the Head of State greeted the 105 “martyrs” of Glières, buried at the national necropolis of Morette, in Thônes (Haute-Savoie), these “heroes” who defended “9,000 hectares of France free in the hollow of the peaks".
In front of three sections of Alpine hunters and nearly 600 children, he invoked the motto of these resistance fighters. “Live free or die: such is our viaticum, yesterday, today and tomorrow, so that the Republic may live and France may live,” he said, a little later, during a bath in crowd, the connection with the Russian invasion in Ukraine: "The attackers must stop (...) they must be sure of our determination, so that we can live free or die."
“French people imprisoned French people, French people murdered French people”
Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to the diversity of the 465 resistance fighters who gathered, from January to March 1944, on this plateau at an altitude of 1,400 meters to receive airdrops of weapons from the Allies, in the run-up to the Landing of Provence (August 1944).
“Professors, peasants, notables, Jews as well as Catholics, communists, socialists or Gaullists, anarchists, French and foreign officers united in the same fight against Nazism,” he detailed, saluting the memory of Jean Isaac Tresca, last resistance fighter from Glières, died in 2022 at 104 years old.
At the end of March 1944, the German army and militia invaded the plateau. Two thirds of the resistance fighters were taken prisoner and 124 killed during the fighting or shot, nine disappeared, sixteen died in deportation.
“This is our French tragedy that there were not the French on one side and the Nazis on the other (...) French people imprisoned French people, French people murdered French people,” he said. recalled the head of state.
Emmanuel Macron had already made the trip to Glières in the company of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, on March 31, 2019, for the 75th anniversary of the fighting.
“We must not give in on our values and educate”
In the afternoon, still accompanied by the President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet and the Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu, he placed a white rose in front of the entrance to the house in Izieu (Ain).
He then spoke with four elders of this shelter. "I didn't understand anything about this war that was beyond me. I was angry, I didn't eat anymore," Hélène Waysenson, 8 years old at the time, who had arrived from Luxembourg with two of her brothers, told him.
Also read: Roundup of the children of Izieu: the miraculous Samuel Pintel cannot “let down” his comrades
“It takes a lot of resilience to come and talk to you,” noted Roger Wolman, who, in 1943, aged five, spent a few weeks in the house when his parents had been deported.
Between May 1943 and April 1944, the colony, founded by Sabine Zlatin, a Jewish resistance fighter of Polish origin, and her husband Miron Zlatin, who had fled the Russian Revolution, took in around a hundred children, sometimes for a few weeks.
On April 6, 1944, 44 Jewish children aged four to twelve were rounded up by the Lyon Gestapo on the orders of Klaus Barbie, with their seven educators, also Jewish. All were deported to the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland) and Reval (Estonia). Only one educator survived.
Questioned during a new crowd bath by a young person on the rise of extremes, Emmanuel Macron noted that "nothing justifies returning to these deadly ideologies (..) We must not give in on our values and educate".
The beginning of a long memory cycle
This long memorial cycle, which marks the beginning of the "Renaissance" of France with the victory over the Nazi occupier and the Vichy regime in 1944, will continue until the end of the year.
In particular, celebrations will be held for the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings on June 6, a tribute to the former minister and resistance fighter Georges Mandel assassinated in 1944, the commemorations of the Provence landings and the Liberation of Paris in August, and finally that of Strasbourg in November.
Since 2017, Emmanuel Macron has been making national tributes and historical references, more than his predecessors, with the possible exception of General de Gaulle.
A way for him to invoke a Nation brought together in times of fractures, and to outline, implicitly, his own political project.
After the “memorial wandering” around the First World War in 2018, the commemorations of the Liberation must constitute a highlight of its second five-year term, with the Paris Olympics.
With AFP
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