I’m in the Center for the History of the Resistance and Deportation in Lyon to learn about life here during WWII and the French Underground. It’s a rainy, gloomy day outside, and it’s pretty gloomy in here, too, but it’s also very interesting.
Life in Vichy France
During the first two years of WW II, Lyon was located in the “Free Zone”, also known as Vichy France. The Free Zone was controlled by the Nazis, but the controls were implemented by the French Vichy France government. The Nazis themselves were elsewhere doing other things.
Life in Lyon at the time was no fun. There were shortages of everything. Transportation didn’t exist, other than by bicycle, because most of the gas, (and most of everything else), went to the Germans.
The Vichy government did too good a job at doing what the Germans told them to do, including rounding up Jewish people and sending them off to camps. Purchases of butter, bread, cooking oil, and other basic provisions were controlled by a rationing system that seemed to be based on the whim of the local bureaucrat in charge.
People in Lyon lived this way for about two years, from 1940 through 1942. Then in November, 1942, the Germans decided that they were going to occupy the “Free Zone” after all. They broke the treaty they had made with France two years earlier, but hey, what was anyone gonna do about it?
As people walk through the halls of the museum, they can stop, put on a headset, push a button, and watch a short video. In each of the videos, someone who lived through occupied Lyon tells a story about something that happened to them. I watched a lot of them. Hearing the real people tell their stories was way more effective than reading about it or watching a film.
Some stories were almost funny, describing crazy things they did to make the best of the bad situation. But other stories were difficult to listen to. There weren’t many that had happy endings. I’m sure there was no shortage of those stories to choose from to put in the museum.
The French Underground
It turned out that the Germans also had a miserable time in Southern France. The whole area, with Lyon at its center, was alive with resistance from the French Underground. Lyon was unofficially known as the capital of the French Resistance. Resistance fighters did everything they could think of to fight Nazis any way they could. It wasn’t just a bunch of lone guys with pistols, either. There were literally small armies that sprang up in localized areas.
One group was known as the Maquis, (pronounced “MACK-ee”). That name came about because of a similarly named bush that grows wild in southern France. Many roads in the area were lined with them. One of the favorite things for the Maquis to do was to hide in those bushes until some unsuspecting Nazi officers made the mistake of driving by.
The Maquis would ambush them, get whatever information they could out of them, kill them, and then leave them in a conspicuous place for the next patrol to find. They’d often kill Nazi officers in some kind of gruesome way that would make the next guy think twice about going down that particular road.
Another group, made up mostly of guys who had worked on the railroad, did things like diverting German freight shipments so they’d end up at the wrong location, or foul up track switching to cause derailments. Similar groups, made up mostly of telephone workers and postal workers, intercepted phone messages and mail, then provided whatever they’d come up with to the British.
The Alliance Network
Then there was the Alliance Network – one of the largest groups of organized resistance fighters. Their headquarters was right in the town of Vichy itself. The leader, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, had taken over leadership of the group when the former leader got caught.
The Alliance Network had the unusual nickname of “Noah’s Ark”. It was so named because Madame Fourcade had given key members of the operation’s network names of animals as their code names. (Madame Fourcade’s code name was “Hedgehog”. If you learn to read french, you can read her biography).
To support the various French resistance groups, Winston Churchill established an intelligence organization called the Special Operations Executive, (SOE). Together with the French, they set up a way for downed allied airmen to get out of France via Spain, then over to England. They supplied groups like Noah’s Ark with guns, money, and short-wave radios airlifted in to remote areas at night.
But the Resistance was still a bunch of diverse groups operating more or less independently. What they needed was someone to pull them all together. That person, Jean Moulin, was about to arrive on the scene.
To be continued…
The featured image at the top of the post is a photo of a group of Maquisards.
