Do not trust the frozen hands of the two imposing clocks which sit on the first floor of the Villa des Tourelles, in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine).
In the premises of the Local History Society (SHL), time is not suspended or, if it is, it is on the lips of Jacqueline Dupont and Éliane Bailly.
These 92- and 87-year-old Nanterre women with lively eyes are two of the twelve witnesses of the Second World War, whose story is recorded by Dominique Lhotellier and Pascale Bœuf in “The children of Nanterre in the turmoil of 1939-1945”, a work published this Saturday, January 20 on the occasion of the general assembly of the historical society.
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“The image of [the] father in soldier’s uniform”, the gas masks which “smell like rubber”, “the sound of a bomb threat” and the “Marshal, here we come” intoned daily in class… At Thanks to their exchanges, the two ladies mobilize all their senses to exhume snippets of their childhood, forever marked with the seal of war.
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