• A member of the Resistance during the Second World War, Andrée Julien was the last survivor of the Nazi camps in Gard. She died at the age of 100 late Thursday evening.
  • Arrested at the age of 19 on denunciation, she was sent to the Neue Bremm torture camp, then to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, before being transferred in 1944 to a shell factory. She had escaped in April 1945.
  • For many years, after her retirement, she never ceased to testify about Nazi barbarity in front of schoolchildren, urging them to always be vigilant.

She had just celebrated her centenary on March 4. Andrée Julien, resistance fighter and then deported during the Second World War, died late Thursday evening. A liaison officer in the resistance, she was the last Gard survivor of the Nazi camps.

She joined the resistance at the age of 17 and was 19 on April 28, 1942, when she was arrested on denunciation before being sent to Neue Bremm, a torture camp run by the Gestapo, on the outskirts of Saarbrücken, and then to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, reserved for women. Before, finally, being transferred to a shell factory in Leipzig-Schönefeld, in July 1944. Until the evacuation of the camp on April 13, 1945. She had managed to escape, after three days of forced marches.

The testimony of Nazi barbarity to thousands of children

Made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in July 2008, she received the Medal of Officer of the Legion of Honour on 11 October 2022. "Your career calls for respect and consideration," recalled the prefect of Gard, Marie-Françoise Lecaillon, at the time of presenting him with this distinction.

After her career at the prefecture of Nièvre and then that of Gard, Andrée Julien intervened for years and until 2019 with thousands of children in schools, to testify to the horror of the camps. Calling for vigilance: "It was Hitler who died, not Nazism. The latter can return at any time and in any place in the world, "she recalled, tirelessly.

Many testimonies follow one another since the announcement of his death. Like that of the mayor of Nîmes, Jean-Paul Fournier (LR), for whom she had a lot of affection: "We will keep the memory of this committed woman until the end of her life, defending the values of the Republic and fighting against obscurantism. "

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