A “woman of the shadows” to hold up the light. At 102 years old, Mélanie Berger-Volle will carry the Olympic flame, despite her fragile shoulder, in the name of the values of friendship between peoples that she defended during the Resistance. She must pinch herself at having been chosen by the Loire department and the town hall of Saint-Etienne to light the city during the stage of the flame that she will carry, on June 22, before the Paris Olympic Games.
“I have always loved sport,” explains this slender woman, who until recently walked for an hour every day. If the weight of the torch worried him a little, there was no question of refusing. Grandmother of the gymnast Emilie Volle, who participated in the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, she also wants to be a symbol for women “who fought to do sport like men”. “My ideal has always been to unify the world,” confides the centenarian. “And the Olympics are a great time to get to know other human beings.”
A life of activism and resistance
Born in Austria in 1921 into a Jewish working-class family, Mélanie Berger began activism as a teenager in a far-left group. “We were atheists and when I started to fight it was not for religious reasons, it was political,” she emphasizes. “I am against all dictatorships. » After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, she left her country, passed through Belgium and arrived in France, in Paris in the spring of 1939, disguised as a boy.
When France entered the war, all Austrians were seen as enemies and the authorities put her on a train heading to a camp near Pau. “At Clermont-Ferrand station, I jumped [du wagon] “, she remembers. The young activist is well aware that “when you have a chance, you must not let it pass you by. »
In 1940, she found herself in Montauban, where a group of Trotskyist militants of which she was part before the war began to reform. “With my French-sounding name, I rented an apartment in a dilapidated house, and from there we could start work.” Discreetly, the group wrote and distributed leaflets in German intended to turn back the soldiers of the Reich. But in January 1942, she was arrested after a police raid on this house. She says she “was mistreated” during her interrogations. “I had some after-effects, but I’m still here!” “, she says. After thirteen months of detention in Toulouse, she was transferred to Baumettes in Marseille.
“I wanted to change the world and I still want to change it”
On October 15, 1943, members of her group, with the French resistance, came to pick her up, accompanied by a German soldier won over to the cause, while she was hospitalized for jaundice. “I escaped in my nightgown,” she laughs again. Once recovered, she campaigned until the Liberation under false identities.
After the war, she married Lucien Volle, also a resistance fighter who participated in the liberation of Puy-en-Velay. Together, the couple began to devote themselves to memory work. “We continually struggled to explain, not what we had done, but why we had done it,” underlines Mélanie Volle-Berger. She has since received multiple decorations, including the Legion of Honor. “I haven’t done much,” she believes. But I said “no” to Nazism. »
Today very worried about the return of extremes in Europe, she hopes that young people will in turn know how to defend democracy. And despite her great age, she intends to take advantage of the Olympics to make her message resonate. “I wanted to change the world and I still want to change it.”