A great lady has just made her bow to life. Deported to Germany during World War II, Anise Postel-Vinay devoted herself after the Liberation to writing the history of the deportation.
Saturday May 23, died at the age of 97, the resistant Anise Postel-Vinay, deported to Germany with Germaine Tillion during the Second World War.
"These resistant women have had extremely rich lives, their fight did not stop in 1945 and our role is to continue it," said Geneviève Zamansky-Bonnin, secretary general of the Association Germaine Tillion and close to the deceased.
Who was Anise Postel-Vinay?
Anise Girard, her maiden name, born June 12, 1922 in Paris. Very quickly, she joined her adolescence in the Resistance, encouraged by her mother, and provided military information within the Gloria SMH network (His Majesty Service), according to the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Besançon.
Blow of fate, she was arrested by the Gestapo for acts of resistance, when she was only 19 years old, in August 1942. First incarcerated in the Health prison, she was then taken to Fresnes, to to be finally deported by train in October 1943 to the concentration camp of Ravensbrück, in Germany, alongside the resistant Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, niece of the General.
"I was very depressed because I did not have the courage to escape. On the passenger train where we were seated, Germaine made me speak and made it possible to forget my feeling of cowardice, "she confided in 2015 to the magazine Le Pèlerin.
"I was 20, Germaine 35, she pulled me out of the distress that threatened me," she also told AFP in 2014 during a presidential tribute to the Resistance. "We lived in terror, distress, in this place of death," she will say in particular about the deportation.
A feather in the service of world memory
On April 23, 1945, Anise Postel-Vinay was released by the Swedish Red Cross. Following the Liberation, she joined Germaine Tillion in writing the history of the deportation. Anise Postel-Vinay, whose family was from Doubs, worked hard to donate the archives of Germaine Tillion to the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Besançon, where she will remain “one of our most faithful witnesses”, according to The direction.
“In 2009, she came to deposit the operetta manuscript secretly written in Ravensbrück by Germaine Tillion in October 1944‘ The Verfügbar in Hell ’, one of the masterpieces of our collection. (…) She will remain with us as one of our most faithful witnesses whose protective gaze and kindness will guide us. ”, Underlined the museum management.
You can find his story of his daily deportation, "Living", Grasset editions with Laure Adler.