“When you resisted, you were already a victor. You had already won.”
In early 1941 in Nazi-occupied France, a German officer stopped a 17-year-old girl and her ailing grandfather. She explained that they were taking the train to see family in their home village near Amiens, between Paris and the Belgian border.“I was humiliated, my fear turned into anger,” recalled Madeleine Riffaud. “I remember saying to myself, ‘I don’t know who they are or where they are, but I’ll find the people who are fighting this and I’ll join them’.”Riffaud’s war began that day.
“Everyone who came on to the street got a gun. Kids dug up the roads, people threw down beds, furniture, anything to build the barricades,” Riffaud told“It was – almost – a party,” she added. “I got quite good at it,” Riffaud remembered. “I’d walk up to a policeman and sweet talk him, then show him our requisition bill which said the Resistance needed his revolver. I would say he could do the patriotic thing.”
Crowds in the garden witnessed the execution. “It was right,” she added. “I felt very calm, very pure.” “You cannot understand how wonderful it was to fight finally as free men and women, to battle in the daylight, under our own names, with our real identities, with everyone out there, all of Paris, to support us, happy, joyful and united,” she said in theMore than six decades later, she still revelled in the glory of liberation, but she struggled with the memories of what was required.newspaper in 2016. “It is never good to kill anyone, even an enemy.
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