OCTOBER 2nd 2017

On October 2nd 2017, professor Giuliano Albarani, president of the Resistance and Contemporary History Institute in Modena, introduced to our group of students the events that took place in Southern France during World War Two: the unsuitable preparation of the French army led to what Marc Bloch (famous Jewish historian, partisan from 1943 with the name “Narbonne”, executed by a firing squad in 1944 in St.-Didier-de-Formans) defined “the unusual defeat” (L’Étrange défaite); the division of France into two parts, the establishment of the Vichy Government (Régime de Vichy) in the southern part and the collaborationism of the President, Marshal Philippe Pétain, up until the enforcement of racial laws which discriminated Jews and led to their reclusion and their deportation at first in collection camps on French territory (e.g. Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, Montluc, Camp des Milles), and then in concentration camps built by the third Reich in Eastern-Central Europe.