FILE. 80 years since the liberation of the camps: Noëlle and her friends who survived the horror camps

Noëlle (2e en partant de la gauche) avec ses amies du lycée.

In Montpellier in 1944, Noëlle Vincensini, Jeanne Bleton, Josette Peyre, Paulette Bertholio, then young resistance fighters, were deported to Ravensbruck. The incredible destiny of four war heroines.

With their charming smiles, their blow-dries, their fitted skirts and their buttoned blouses, nothing distinguishes them from other young girls. Jeanne, Josette, Paulette are students at the Montpellier teacher training college while Noëlle is still a high school student at Clémenceau.

These four friends have a common secret: they are part of the resistance: the first three for the Secret Army; Noëlle for the FTP. In the streets of Montpellier, they distribute leaflets and transport goods.

She delivers weapons to the maquis

Noëlle sometimes even delivers weapons to the Cévennes maquis, to Narbonne and Nîmes. “One day, when she was 16, she took the train with a suitcase in which weapons were hidden. As it was heavy, an SS man helped her to carry her luggage into the carriage”, recounts her daughter Elsa Chabrol.

With her group of resistance fighters, they used to meet near Les Arceaux. This spring of 1944, when there were about thirty of them, gathered discreetly, they were arrested by the Gestapo. Her friends suffered the same fate in a villa in the Aubes district. Noëlle was to be sentenced to death.

Noëlle's aunt, a Pétainist, with whom she lived (!) and who threw her out when she discovered her activities, nevertheless went to see the police and explained to them that her niece was the youngest in the group, that she didn't know what she was doing and that she had to be released.

The prisoners were also upset by such a death sentence for such a young girl. Noëlle was tortured. In front of her mutilated body, the SS soldier says: “Nothing to do with the kid. She's tough”.

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A box of sugars that will change everything

She escapes execution but is deported to Ravensbruck. Thrown into a cattle car, her journey to the horror of Ravensbruck lasts three days and four nights. After months of terror, hunger and cold, in the spring, Noëlle and her friends escape the death march. The four teenagers who are nothing more than gaunt silhouettes and emaciated faces manage to escape to an abandoned farm. A box of sugar thrown by a German column gave them the strength to flee in their despair.

A year later, Noëlle, Josette, Jeanne and Paulette return to Montpellier. Their smiles have disappeared from their faces and their bodies are nothing more than bones and wounds. All four of them keep quiet about this tragic episode of their existence. “My mother said nothing for decades because she was afraid that no one would believe her. She thought that no one could understand what had happened to her”, says Noëlle Vincensini's daughter.

She will wait until she is 70 to speak

At the age of 70, she finally manages to put words to the unspeakable and write Un Lump de Sucre, a book in which she recounts this painful past through “duty of memory”. Jeanne Bleton and Josette Peyre have also written a story of their lives as resistance fighters and deportees in Un Certain Voyage. Precious testimonies that speak of the inhumanity but also the courage of these young women from Montpellier for freedom.

Noëlle continued to lead a life of struggle. Married to the Cévennes writer Jean-Pierre Chabrol and then divorced, she fought for anti-racism, against electoral fraud in Corsica, her native island, and created the first free radio station in France… Her daughter tells us:“She always cared about others, she was always very attached to social justice”. Today, at 108 years old, the fighter can no longer act but she has definitively transformed into a heroine. Just like Jeanne, Josette and Paulette.

“Le pièce de sucre et autres récits” by Noëlle Vincensini, Albiana editions. 13 euros. “Un certain voyage, at the author's expense.

La Sétoise Suzanne Pic

Suzanne Pic, 17 years old: Ravensbrück, registration number 43155; Hasag -Leipzig registration number 4046. Suzanne was deported when she was 17. She was born in Sète and it was there that she Macon (where her father, a tax inspector, was transferred) that she joined the resistance alongside her mother and brother. On May 21, 1944, she was arrested, following a denunciation, with her mother and a friend of her brother, and interned in the citadel of Perpignan where she underwent violent interrogation. She was then deported to Ravensbrück. She was then assigned to forced labor in a Hasag-Leipzig commando, an arms factory that depended on the Buchenwald camp. On the night of April 13-14, 1945, the SS emptied the camp due to the advance of the Allied troops and she suffered the death marches. On May 18, 1945, she was released with her mother. She was just 18 years old, and suffered from bone tuberculosis. She married and became Suzanne Orts. She died on February 21, 2018 in Aix-en-Provence.

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