2023-05-27 14:28:25
The communist resistant Odette Nilès, Guy Môquet’s “fiancée” and last survivor of the Choisel camp, died at the age of 100 on the night of Friday to Saturday, announced the PCF.
“Odette Niles represented a century of commitment and freedom. We will continue to carry his work of memory”, paid tribute to him Emmanuel Macronon Twitter.
“We are losing a dear friend and comrade. France is losing a great figure of the Resistance”, greeted the national secretary of the communist party Fabien Roussel, in a press release, on this anniversary day of the creation of the National Council of Resistance.
“She never stopped passing on her story to the children”
Born on December 27, 1922 in Paris and a member of the Young Communists from 1940, she distributed leaflets and took part in demonstrations from the start of the war. She was arrested by the French police on August 13, 1941 on her way to one of them.
Transferred to the Choisel camp in Châteaubriant (Loire-Atlantique), she meets Guy Môquet there, “at the barrier”, limit between the camp of men and that of women, and promises him a “skate”. But Guy Môquet was shot the next day, October 22, 1941, and his ultimate message was for Odette: “I’m going to die (…) without having had what you had promised me”, this kiss.
For nearly three years, the young woman was interned in several camps. Until that of Mérignac (Gironde), from where she escaped in 1944, joining the Resistance in Bordeaux. It was there that she met Maurice Nilès, a young FFI (French Interior Forces) commander who would become her husband.
After the war, he was deputy (1958-1985) and PCF mayor (1959-1997) of Drancy. Odette Nilès remained faithful to her communist ideal all her life and campaigned for women’s rights. “She never ceased to pass on to the children her story, our story, and the values of these women and men to whom we owe our freedom today as a Nation,” added Fabien Roussel.
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