The weight of the torch has been a priority however there was by no means any query of turning it down.
“I’ve at all times beloved sport,” says the sprightly centenarian who till just lately loved an hour’s stroll a day.
‘Mistreated’
Born in Austria in 1921 right into a Jewish working-class household, Melanie Berger started her activism as a youngster in an excessive left-wing group.
“We had been atheists and once I began combating it wasn’t for spiritual causes, it was political,” she says. “I’m towards all dictatorships.”
After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, she left her nation, went to Belgium after which arrived in France, in Paris in the spring of 1939, disguised as a boy.
When France went to struggle later that yr, all Austrians, even refugees, had been seen as enemies and the authorities put her on a practice to a camp close to Pau.
At Clermont-Ferrand station, she “jumped out” of the carriage.
She was on her personal as the different women didn’t dare comply with her.
“They weren’t political, they didn’t know what a camp was,” she shrugs.
On the opposite, the younger activist was properly conscious that “if you get an opportunity, you’ll be able to’t let it go by”.
In 1940 after the French give up to the Nazis, she discovered herself in Montauban, the place a bunch of Trotskyist militants she had belonged to earlier than the struggle was starting to reform.
“With my French-sounding title, I rented a flat in a dilapidated home, and from there we had been ready to begin work.”
Discreetly, the group drafted and distributed German-language leaflets geared toward turning Reich troopers.
In January 1942, nonetheless, that every one got here to an finish when the police raided the home and he or she was arrested and brutally interrogated.
“I used to be mistreated, males beat me,” she says quietly. “The after-effects are still with me. But I’m still right here.”
She averted a demise penalty and after 13 months in detention in Toulouse, the 22-year-old Berger was transferred to the Baumettes jail in Marseille.
Members of her group, along with the Resistance, ready her escape.
Melanie Berger-Wolle poses at her dwelling in Saint-Etienne on March 26, 2024. — eNM pic
‘No’ to Nazism
On October 15, 1943, they got here to get her, accompanied by a German soldier who had taken up the trigger, whereas she was in hospital with jaundice.
“I escaped in my nightdress,” she laughs.
Once recovered, she campaigned below false identities till the liberation in the summer season of 1944.
After the struggle, she married Lucien Volle, one other Resistance fighter who had taken half in the liberation of Le Puy-en-Velay.
Together, the couple started to dedicate themselves to the work of remembrance.
“We fought continuously to clarify. Not what we had finished however why we had finished it,” she says.
She has since been awarded a lot of decorations, together with the Legion d’Honneur.
“I didn’t do a lot,” she says. “But I did say ‘no’ to Nazism.”
Worried once more about the return of extremes in Europe, Berger-Volle hopes that younger individuals will in flip give you the option to defend democracy.
“I wished to change the world,” she says with a smile. “And I still need to change it.” — eNM
