2023-08-06 06:00:30
The old man has spoken. Edmond Réveil, known as “Papillon” in the clandestinity of the Corrèze maquis, has freed his conscience. It was only time. He is now 98 years old. He was already 95, good foot, good eye, at the end of 2019, when he finally revealed his secret. It was during a banal meeting of veterans, in Meymac, the commune of Limousin where he had returned to spend his retirement, after a long professional exile in the Paris region. The agenda was exhausted.
The members were already heading for the reception when he had cleared his throat. “I have something to tell you”, he began. A big thing. In front of a mute assembly of stupor, Edmond Réveil recounted this day of June 12, 1944 when precisely here, in Le Vert, a hamlet near Meymac, he had witnessed the summary execution of 47 German prisoners and a French collaborator by comrades of his section. The soldiers had been shot one by one and buried in the pit they had dug themselves. Lots had to be drawn who would kill the woman, for want of a volunteer.
Nearly eighty years after the facts and four years after this admission, the story could find its epilogue. The National Office for Combatants and War Victims (ONACVG) has taken up the case, in conjunction with the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (VDK), the German association whose mission is to find all over the world the bodies soldiers who disappeared during the various conflicts. The place of the executions has been found, according to the authorities. In July, radar soundings detected terrain anomalies and the presence of buried metal objects.
Excavations are due to begin on August 16 to bring the remains to light, work that will mobilize a good fifteen specialists in archeology. “We have the cautious hope of finding the mortal remains of the soldiers”, ensures the VDK in a press release. “The results of the soil analysis campaign seem convincing”, ensures for its part the prefecture of Corrèze. As an aside, officials talk about “quasi-certainty”. A Marseilles laboratory is already mobilized to analyze and try to identify the bodies that would be dug up.
A bad moment of a bad time
Edmond Réveil was a modest 19-year-old liaison officer when he was precipitated into this tragedy. Since then, the former resistance fighter, who had become a railway worker, had hidden deep within him this painful, unbearable memory. He had hidden it from his wife, his children, his friends and even his brother-in-law who was nevertheless a leader of the maquis. It was a bad moment in a bad time, drowned in those days of mourning that Limousin went through before being liberated. He was inseparable from the endless trail of blood that crossed the region at the same time.
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