The testimony of one of the youngest resistance fighters in France, a precious and captivating document

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How did this wonderful human and literary adventure that is “I was 12 years old and I was resistant” begin? strong>

Johanna Cincinatis It starts in fall 2020. I suggest to Olivier that we work on a series of podcasts which would aim to highlight women who have left their mark on the Occitanie region. Olivier has the idea of ​​doing an episode on the resistance.

Olivier Montégut It’s a subject that was close to my heart and I had worked on it at school of journalism. We find one: Marie-Louise Dissard in Toulouse. a podcast sponsored by the Occitanie Region, we try to go a little further than Toulouse By chance, I came across the profile of Josette who appears in a few web articles in the newspaper L'Indépendant. Perpignan and which presents her as the youngest resistance fighter in France I contact Josette via an association that she chairs to have her testimony We first receive a refusal. is a little disappointed to see that she doesn't want to talk, especially since we understand that the duty to remember was important to her. And Josette, I think, is a little taken aback… A few days later, she calls me back directly to say “I accept an interview”. We meet Josette. We're doing his interview for the podcast. A relationship is born with her.We offer her portrait written in the first person for the magazine It interests me. A few months after publication of the subject, Johanna was contacted by a representative of the Harper Collins house who suggested that we write her story in a book. Josette, who had always refused to do so with relatives or other journalists, as we are young, as we have been able to pass on her story twice, she trusts us. And all 3 of us become co-authors.

Reading this document is extremely disturbing to the extent that the richness of details and the tone give the impression of being “immersed” in the middle of the Second World War. How did you collect Josette's words and how did you search for the information necessary to write this document?

JC We spent a lot of time with Josette. There was a time when we were on a schedule where we spoke to each other every 2 weeks for 3-4 hours. It lasted between 6 months and a year. In the summer, we start writing and then we say to ourselves: OK, how are we going to construct a story? First of all, from a storytelling point of view, what are we going to do? Are we doing something chronological? Are we doing something a little biphasic (which is what they did) with the time jumps? We wanted cliffhangers, secondary characters... But there you go, Josette, she is 93 years old. There are details that escape him. We therefore assumed that there would be a part that would be fictionalized. This fictionalized part, in fact, is perhaps 5% of the story. It's for example: the color of a piece of clothing, a dialogue that didn't exactly happen like that . It’s really down to the details because she still has a crazy memory. I say 5% because everything else was intact. She told us scenes that were so visual, cinematic...

Isn't it because the trauma is still alive?

"Josette remained at the age of her trauma. This is why it is so vivid in her memory. Her life really stopped at 14 when she learned of the death of her father and she refused him.

OM It's as if she had mentally frozen what had happened and it came back to her in the 90s. That's why it remained so intact. , That’s the first point. The second point is that as Johanna says, we made her work a lot. Memory is a muscle. At each scene, at each key moment in the story, we made him repeat, rehearse, rework, ask him what color was this item of clothing? What was the ambiance of this kitchen? What was this person like physically? There were even times when, after 4 hours spent with her, the next day she contacted us to say: “I thought all night... My mother's nurse's dress was blue, she was not not white. »

At the end of the writing, we went to Perpignan for 4 days, immersed in the Pyrenees, in the atmosphere of this story. We went on a hike again with Josette's daughter, following in the footsteps of Josette and her father. We had all the visual elements of the villages they passed through to get people into the Pyrenees. That too gave us color. We interviewed people from his family. We also had counter points of view on the secondary characters. The famous 5%, as Johanna says, fuels dialogues that did not necessarily happen at that time and exactly like that. But in fact, we rediscovered the idea, we retransformed it all. All these ingredients make it so lively and precise.

There is a great fluidity in the writing with a style and tone that are the same from start to finish. One might believe that it is the same author who wrote everything from A to Z. How did you manage to write with 3 people?

OM Josette was there a lot to testify, reread, correct, suggest… She didn't write strictly speaking but it's her story. For our part, every time we found Josette, we did verbatim, that is to say: we took word for word what she said. Then we divided the chapters, the key moments of his resistance according to our affinities. Then we corrected them. We therefore had a double reading. This already made it possible to unify the tone a little. It’s true that we don’t have exactly the same handwriting with Johanna, that’s still normal. A few months before submitting the manuscript, when we left for the Pyrenees, we went over chapter by chapter. We rewrote everything between 2 people: that is to say, all the sentences, all the words, we took what existed and reformulated it. What gave such a unified tone was that we took everything together. We thought about each word, each sentence, each intonation, each scene. Josette validated everything. There were some marginal corrections but it’s really a matter of detail. The very last version of the manuscript that was sent to her, she read it in its entirety (until then, she had chapters). We called her andshe told us that we couldn’t have been more right. That she had the impression that we had experienced that with her.

How did Josette and her family react to reading the document?

OM Josette , it was a way for her, she told us several times, to mourn. If we can mourn. It’s a huge page that she’s turning. I think it was the conclusion of his awareness in the 90s. I think that in that regard, it honestly helped him. She is no longer the same as when we met her. When I first met her, she was much more distant. The book was a mammoth task for her. But today, she tells it in front of the students in a much more peaceful way than she did some time ago. For her children, it was also a way to reconnect with their mother. The grandchildren already had this connection, but today it is a source of pride for them to see their grandmother who expresses herself so much. Overall, we'll say 90%, it was well received by the family because we were very close with them. We have been there many times. We did all the promotion with them.

How did the writing of this novel has it modified your relationship with the World?

JC I realized that 'in fact, it wasn't just a story of resistance that we wrote but it's a story of the relationship between a father and his daughter. A close relationship. What people want is to love and be loved. Would Josette have done this if her father had not done it? It's difficult to write it like that and to write it well while being respectful of the characters who are real people. We delved a little into a family with its traumas, its heartbreaks, its sometimes clumsy, fragile loves...I was fascinated at one point while writing, I said to myself "in fact, we are writing about the family."

OM Josette remains and will remain our, and my, most beautiful interview subject. But beyond the journalistic object, I have the feeling that we participated with her in a transmission. She is one of the last, if not perhaps the last, but in any case she is one of the last resistance fighters still alive and therefore she is the last living witness who can tell young people that she had to live in deprivation, that her father was deported, that she resisted, that she said no to the Nazi invasion. It's crazy to be able to share that.

What are your projects and news?

JCI am publishing a second book on friendship between women, its specificities, what prevents it and what would allow it to take up more space in our lives. "Elles vécurent heureuses", published by Stock, is a first-person essay that mixes elements of sociological, psychological, and pop culture research. (Spoiler Alert from Toulouscope: it's fascinating!)

OM Professionally, I'm continuing my adventure at AirZen Radio, which is already a project in itself. But if I can share something more personal, in the meantime I had a little girl. I think it's cool to think that it's a story that I can pass on to her. I pray very hard that my granddaughter never has to experience what Josette experienced. But in any case, Josette's spirit of resistance, I hope to be able to pass it on to my daughter.