Website keeps wartime memories alive

“Guillois Michel fell here for the liberation on 20 August, 1944”.

“France Bloch-Serazin, deported resistance member, executed in Hamburg, February 12, 1943.”

As Paris marks the 65th anniversary of its liberation from Nazi occupation, thousands of commemorative plaques on the walls of the capital keep alive the memory of those who suffered and those who resisted.

Last Tuesday, as President Nicolas Sarkozy attended ceremonies marking the liberation, city workers will place flowers at the every one of those plaques.

Guillois Michel died at 38 Avenue de l’Opera, as the plaque at that address records.

The plaque for resistance fighter France Bloch-Serazin is at 1, rue Monticelli, in the south of Paris, where she once lived. Now a website, initially set up to simply record the plaques, is breathing new life into the memories of those who died to liberate the city.

Francois Tanniou, who is passionate about what he calls “the duty to remember”, started the website (www.plaques-commemoratives.org) in 2004 to record all the plaques in Paris connected to the occupation and liberation.

The website had 600 plaques when it was launched, said Tanniou: but thanks to private contributors who sent in photos of others, it quickly grew.

Half the plaques relate to the week of the uprising in August 1944; the fierce street fighting and the arrival of General Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division, which helped liberate the capital.

Relatives of those who had died also wrote in, providing personal details of resistance fighters who had died in the battle to drive out the Nazi forces or had been captured, deported and executed.

“He will never know how proud we are of him,” writes one man of his grandfather who died in a camp in Austria after being deported for belonging to the resistance. “Thank you for preserving the memory of these acts of courage,” writes the grand-daughter of another victim.

In 2001, the city authorities decided to honour the memory of the 12,000 young Parisians deported simply because they were Jewish.

More than 300 plaques have since been put up on the walls of schools that stood at the time of the occupation like the one on a primary school at 11 rue Vivienne in the 2nd Arrondissement, in the heart of the capital.

AFP