Camille Senon, a feminist and union activist who narrowly escaped the Nazi bloodbath in her French village of Oradour-sur-Glane died on Thursday aged 100, the mayor’s workplace mentioned.
Senon was a younger lady when the Third Reich’s elite SS unit marched into Oradour on June 10, 1944, killing 642 villagers, together with all of her household.
“I used to be working in Limoges, however I might return to Oradour on the weekend. That day I took the tramway as common, and we rapidly noticed the black smoke within the distance,” Senon instructed AFP in 2017.
“They saved us a number of hours, explaining to us what that they had finished to Oradour and letting us consider that perhaps they might kill us too,” she recounted.
“What I noticed subsequent is difficult to talk of. There was not a soul left alive.”
Many of the victims had been girls and kids.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of France, Senon joined the CGT union and the Communist Social gathering.
She rose up the male-dominated ranks of the commerce union motion to move one of many CGT’s most necessary girls’s sections in Paris.
All through her life, Senon, who styled herself as an “everlasting insurgent”, by no means gave up preventing for girls’s rights.
“Once I began working, it’s a must to think about… girls nonetheless needed to ask their boss for permission to get married! Misogyny and on a regular basis sexism had been all over the place, together with in commerce unions,” mentioned Senon, who celebrated her one centesimal birthday in June.
In 2014, she ran for municipal elections in Limoges on a left-wing ticket and protested in opposition to a go to to the town by Dieudonne, a comic book and controversialist convicted for hate speech, antisemitism and advocating terrorism.
Two years later, she refused France’s Nationwide Order of Advantage, saying she didn’t wish to “surrender my whole lifetime of activism for better justice and solidarity, freedom, fraternity and peace”.
“It is necessary to remind younger folks to not compromise their values and to stay optimistic, regardless of the circumstances,” she mentioned.
“As a result of even when the world we face is worrying, life has proven me that it’s by no means time to despair.”
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