The War Memorial at Nyons

On our way back from the Nyons market, by a very circuitous route, we passed by a car park in the back streets of Nyon close to the river. I spotted a war memorial and as I had done before, took a photo of it for inclusion in the war memorial section of this blog diary.

These war memorials were generally erected after the Great War with additional sections carved for those, who died in the Second World War. As France surrendered in 1940 and the Bltzkrieg only lasted only a few months after the Phoney War, French miltary casualities were not nearly as high as they were in the Great War. Other casualties included some who excaped France and joined the Free French as part of the British Army, and from the Resistance. As Provence was part of Vichy governed France that was not occupied by Germany as part of the 1940 surrender agreement, there usually aren't many additions on the existing memorials for the Second World War dead.

Having taken a photo, I then looked a little more closely at the memorial. The first thing that caught my eye was that on the list of the fallen, many surnames were repeated, which was odd. Looking around the top inscription of the memoria, it is dedicated to the fallen of 1940-1945 (unusual) with the words translated to mean: To the Martyrs of the Resistance who died for Liberty. However, looking at the friezes, while there are depictions of resistance fighters, there are others which show Jews being rounded up and suffering in the concentration camps. Then the penny dropped why some of the repeating surnames were likely Jewish.

I took pictures of all of friezes. They are poignant.

Perhaps, I am being overly sensitive, but two things struck me. That the positioning of the memorial was in an out of the way car park and not in a public square, and that while, no doubt, the members of the resistance were captured and possibily their or other whole families from villages were killed in reprisals, the inscription somehow skirts the issue that many listed were killed for their religion, whether they were resisting or not. According to the BBC website, in the period 1940 -1944, the French government helped deport 75,721 Jewish refugees and French citizens to Nazi death camps.