Camille Senon, a feminist and union activist who narrowly escaped the Nazi massacre in her French village of Oradour-sur-Glane died today aged 100, the mayor’s office said.
Senon was a young woman when the Third Reich’s elite SS unit marched into Oradour on June 10, 1944, killing 642 villagers, including all of her family.
“I was working in Limoges, but I would return to Oradour at the weekend. That day I took the tramway as usual, and we quickly saw the black smoke in the distance,” Senon told AFP in 2017.
“They kept us several hours, explaining to us what they had done to Oradour and letting us believe that maybe they would kill us too,” she recounted.
“What I saw next is hard to speak of. There was not a soul left alive.”
Most of the victims were women and children.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of France, Senon joined the CGT union and the Communist Party.
She rose up the male-dominated ranks of the trade union movement to head one of the CGT’s most important women’s sections in Paris.
Throughout her life, Senon, who styled herself as an “eternal rebel”, never gave up fighting for women’s rights.
“When I started working, you have to imagine… women still had to ask their boss for permission to get married! Misogyny and everyday sexism were everywhere, including in trade unions,” said Senon, who celebrated her 100th birthday in June.
In 2014, she ran for municipal elections in Limoges on a left-wing ticket and protested against a visit to the city by Dieudonne, a comic and controversialist convicted for hate speech, antisemitism and advocating terrorism.
Two years later, she refused France’s National Order of Merit, saying she did not want to “renounce my entire life of activism for greater justice and solidarity, freedom, fraternity and peace”.
“It’s important to remind young people not to compromise their values and to remain optimistic, whatever the circumstances,” she said.
“Because even if the world we are facing is worrying, life has shown me that it is never time to despair.”
Source: AFP
