The former ‘Maison Mazard’ in Le Soler, now destroyed, was a safe house for Dutch refugees, Jews and resistance members fleeing the nazis in the 1930s.
Elisabeth Eidenbenz was the remarkable Swiss woman who created La Maternité Suisse in Elne as a refuge for expectant mothers exiled from Spain during La Retirada and World War II.
In 1943, when the Gestapo came to Prades , Jean-Michel’s father was fighting with the Resistance and frequently absent.
During World War II the majority of RAF Evaders made their escape or passed through France on their way from Germany and Occupied countries, heading for the coasts in an attempt to return to England.
A silence, our heads are bowed, a prayer from the Mayor. In turn the boys read out the list of the fallen sons of the Great War, perhaps a dozen names from those awful days. This would have been a village of around a hundred people.
Love and War in the Pyrenees by Rosemary Bailey is available in paperback, the cover glowing with the colourful stripes so familiar to lovers of the Catalan fabric of St Laurent de Cerdans.
French writer and poet describes the massacre as unspeakable, its wounds so deep that we dare not mention them, in this desolate poem, ‘Oradour’.
The war is nearing it’s end. The Germans occupying France are on edge and expecting the Allied Invasion at any time.
Robert Hébras Lanois, the last survivor of the horrendous massacre of the village of Oradour, has died at the age of 97. (February 2023).
History tells the facts – Art tells the story