Even if school is over for two weeks, there were many of them this Saturday, October 22 in front of the Constance Lainé school group in Craon in the South of Mayenne. The students, their parents and the elected officials came to inaugurate the new establishment, after two and a half years of work. Among them, distinguished guests: the descendants of Constance Lainé, resistant craonnaise, died in deportation, which gives its name to the school group.
© Radio France
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Selma Rich
The Craonnais themselves sent proposals for names to the town hall, which then put them to a vote. Constance Lainé won the most votes and for his granddaughter Françoise Malin, it’s a very nice surprise. “A big surprise and a big emotion too when we were told that the school group was going to bear the name of our grandmothershe recalls. We rather had the impression that this page of history, which is a painful and difficult page, had been somewhat set aside. We did not think at all that the inhabitants of Craon were still thinking of this period, and in particular of my deported grandmother, because of her resistance.“
Memory duty
For Françoise Malin, it’s even more important that her grandmother’s name is on a school. “It is the passage of witness and the duty of memory“, she adds. A duty of memory fulfilled by the teachers of the school, explains Matthieu Valton, the director of the school. “In kindergarten, what matters is knowing who Constance Lainé was for the city of Craon and France, then in CM1 and CM2, we go deeper into the subject to really make them aware at this age of the duty to remember.”
Like Constance Lainé, 52 non-Jewish women from Mayen (resistant or communist) were arrested and deported during the Occupation. 14 of them died in the camps.
VIDEO – Discover the new Constance Lainé school group
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