2024-04-12 05:47:00
At 102 years old, Mélanie Berger-Volle will carry the Olympic flame as high as possible, despite her fragile shoulder, in the name of the values of friendship between peoples that she defended during the Resistance.
“Woman of the shadows” during the Occupation, she still cannot believe having been chosen by the Loire department and the town hall of Saint-Etienne to light the city during the stage of the flame that She will wear it on June 22, before the Olympic Games (July 26-August 11) and Paralympic Games (August 28-September 8) in Paris.
If the weight of the torch worries her a little, there was no question of refusing: “I have always loved sport,” explains this slender woman, who until recently walked for an hour every day, with vivacity.
Grandmother of the gymnast Emilie Volle, who participated in the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, she also wants to be a symbol for women “who fought to do sport like men”.
“My ideal has always been to unify the world,” confides the centenarian. “And the Olympics are a great time to get to know other human beings.”
Born in Austria in 1921 into a Jewish working-class family, Mélanie Berger began activism as a teenager in a far-left group. “We were atheists and when I started to fight it was not for religious reasons, it was political,” she emphasizes. “I am once morest all dictatorships.”
After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, she left her country, passed through Belgium and arrived in France, in Paris in the spring of 1939, disguised as a boy.
“Mistreated”
When France entered the war, all Austrians, even refugees, were seen as enemies and the authorities put her on a train heading to a camp near Pau.
“At Clermont-Ferrand station, I jumped” from the carriage, she remembers. The other girls don’t dare follow her. “They weren’t political, they didn’t know what a camp was.” The young activist is well aware, on the contrary, that “when you have a chance, you must not let it pass you by.”
In 1940, she found herself in Montauban, where a group of Trotskyist militants of which she was part before the war began to reform. “With my French-sounding name, I rented an apartment in a dilapidated house, and from there we might start work.”
Discreetly, the group wrote and distributed leaflets in German intended to turn back the soldiers of the Reich.
In January 1942, the police raided this house and she was arrested. During the interrogation sessions, “I was mistreated, men beat me,” she says modestly. “I had some following-effects, but I’m still here!”
After 13 months of detention in Toulouse, she was transferred to Baumettes in Marseille. Members of his group, along with the French resistance, then prepared his escape.
“No” to Nazism
On October 15, 1943, they came to pick her up, accompanied by a German soldier won over to the cause, while she was hospitalized for jaundice.
“I escaped in my nightgown,” she laughs once more.
Once recovered, she campaigned until the Liberation under false identities.
After the war, she married Lucien Volle, also a resistance fighter who participated in the liberation of Puy-en-Velay. Together, the couple began to devote themselves to memory work.
“We continually struggled to explain, not what we had done, but why we had done it,” underlines Mélanie Volle-Berger.
She has since received multiple decorations, including the Legion of Honor. “I haven’t done much,” she believes. “But I said ‘no’” to Nazism.
Today very worried regarding the return of extremes in Europe, she hopes that young people will in turn know how to defend democracy. And despite her great age, she intends to take advantage of the Olympics to make her message resonate. “I wanted to change the world and I still want to change it.”
Mélanie Berger-Volle Olympic Games 2024 Paris Games
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