Josette Torrent has just celebrated her 93rd birthday, but her life changed much earlier, when she lived in Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales) with her parents. One evening, on her way home from college, she finds her father, Michel, lying on the kitchen floor, feeling unwell. He asks her to carry a secret document. She then discovers that he is part of the Gallia resistance network. “I had never heard that word before, I thought it was the name of a new clothing store since he worked in a ready-to-wear shop, she smiled. He made me promise to keep it a secret. I shouldn’t tell anyone, not my friends or my sister, or even my mother. »
The pact is sealed. She goes to a tunnel between Saint-Assiscle and Perpignan station and, as agreed, passes the document to a man with a hat who whistles the song With my girlfriend. Everything went as planned. Josette was then 12 years, 4 months and 17 days old when she carried out this first mission, which made her, until proven otherwise, the youngest liaison officer in the Resistance.
A double life that she killed for fifty years before recounting it in the book I was 12 years old and I was resistant, co-written by Johanna Cincinatis and Olivier Montégut, published in April by HarperCollins. Gifted to be discreet, she brings other messages without anyone suspecting anything. We don’t ask questions at the Torrents. “I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. Michel said to me: “The less you know the better you are.” And if I had been caught, I wouldn’t have been able to say much”, she points out. One thing is for sure, she was never scared, too “delighted to be able to do something to put the Boches out”.
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High “like a boy by his father”, Josette Torrent learned fishing and navigation alongside him in Saint-Malo, where she lived from age 4 to 10, until the sound of German boots convinced the family to go down to the free zone. In Perpignan, she trains to code messages on postcards and to accompany resistance fighters wishing to reach Spain by acting as a scout with her bicycle. If she encounters a patrol of Germans on the way, she pretends she is lost, while the resistance fighters hide in the thickets with her father. “No one is suspicious of a little girl”, she observes.
At school, she never takes her eyes off her geography atlas. Not out of interest in the material, but because his father made a lining there in order to slip in the papers destined for the Resistance. Again, Josette asks nothing. “I may not be very curious, but insofar as it was not necessary to ask too many explanations, I was silent”, she clarifies. She continues to sit on a bench in a garden near the station, with her books and notebooks. Men take their places at his side, pretend to read the newspaper, whisper the password to him, and take the atlas from the pile of supplies, exchanging it for an identical copy.
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