The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron commemorated, this Sunday, the 80th anniversary of the roundup of the Vél d’Hiv. He inaugurated a new place of memory in the old station of Pithiviers (Loiret). Eight convoys had left for the concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We learned today of the disappearance in Nîmes of a figure of the Resistance in the Gard: Josette Roucaute. She was going to be 99 on August 1, and had settled in Saint-Hilaire-de-Brethmas.
“An underground miner grandfather, a coal sorting grandmother. Josette Roucaute first worked in Alès as a panty-maker in a small workshop on Avenue Carnot.“, says Jean-Paul Boré, president of the Gard delegation of AFMD, Friends of the Foundation for the Memory of Deportation, in the Gard.
42 191. This is the registration number assigned to her when she was deported to the Ravensbrück camp. In June 44. She must then manufacture shells for the Germans. Compulsory work she has to do in Leipzig. She was then assigned to Kommando Schonefeld in the Buchenwald camp.
Josette Roucaute had been denounced for her activity in the Resistance, where she joined at only sixteen years old. In particular the tracts it circulates. One day she dropped off a bundle of these leaflets, entitled ” Pétain the guillotine ” , in a bus that travels between Alès and Nîmes. She is arrested by the gendarmes, undergoes three days of interrogation, without confessing or swinging anything. Prison. Then, therefore, deportation. In Buchenwald, she survives for a year before escaping, when the SS emptied the camp as the Allied forces closed in.
War Medal. Military Cross. After having lived in Prague, in particular, she returned to the Gard in the 1980s. She settled in Saint-Hilaire de Brethmas. And for all these years, Josette Roucaute has cultivated the duty of memory in the schools of the department. The Saint-Hilaire school bears his name since 2015.