“To not forget”. The memorial in tribute to the 71 victims of the Roc des Fiz disaster, this landslide which swept away part of the Plateau d’Assy sanatorium on April 16, 1970, making 71 dead including 56 childrenwas officially inaugurated this Saturday afternoon, in front of more than 200 people : families of victims, inhabitants, former rescue workers and employees. This block of marble, in the shape of a broken mountain where the 71 names of the disappeared appear, had been built two years ago, but had never been inaugurated due to the pandemic.
Deep emotion of the families of the disappeared
“It is a monument that all families have been waiting for for 52 years”, said on Friday on France Bleu Pays de Savoie lawyer Daria Verallo-Borivant, vice-president of the Roc des Fiz collectivewho lost his brother in the disaster. “Our parents fought for 11 years to obtain justice, because the death of my brother, like that of all the children who perished in this tragedy, was an injustice without name”. “Today we have a very, very beautiful stele, in a place accessible to all, in a parking lot”. The memorial is located very close to the Le Fontenay residence, the building where the doctors of the sanatorium lived (route du Dr Davy, in the direction of Plaine-Joux).
A buried, forgotten story
– Hugo Deschamps
“It’s important to recognize those 71 lives that were taken that night,” had commented on Friday (guest of 6-9 of May 27) the Haut-Savoyarde Perrine Lamy-Quique, originally from Thônes, and author of a book-investigation (In their night, published by Le Seuil) which compiles 25 testimonies (survivors, relatives of the disappeared, former rescuers, etc.) and sheds light on the disaster through unpublished archive documents. Ten days before the tragedy, a first landslide had taken place, as a first alert, which had been ignored by the management of the establishment and Doctor Couve de Murville.
No longer feel alone in the face of your emotions
“It was an invisible, buried story that revolved around an official legend”, says Perrine Lamy-Quique. This book and this memorial make it possible to “to bring back what was behind this blind spot in our national history (…) to record what happened, so that something remains”. It’s a way of “to be able to tell those who have suffered from their past, that you can transform your desire for revenge into a desire to shed light on what you have been through, and not feel so alone in the face of these emotions”.
– Hugo Deschamps
This memorial was financed by the city of Passy, the ALIA Foundation (ex-VSHA, villages of health and hospitalization at altitude) and the prefecture of Haute-Savoie.
>>> Our colleagues from franceinter devoted a program to this subject (Sensitive Affairs, Fabrice Drouelle), to listen to again here: The Plateau d’Assy disaster or the “sana-tomb”