It is a very beautiful “A Voix Nue” dedicated by Béatrice Leca to Hélène Mouchard-Zay. Because, with a clear voice, the latter summons the past and she knows that, beyond her personal history, it is history with its great axe, as Perec said, which is given here to To hear.

But first, she remembers. That she only met her father in prison, and the first time at 9 months. She remembers this absence and all that she will learn later. That this father was one of the centerpieces of the Popular Front wanted by Léon Blum (to which Philippe Collin has just devoted a remarkable series in nine episodes on France Inter). That as Minister of National Education and Fine Arts, Jean Zay (1904-1944) contributed to democratizing and modernizing education, played a decisive role in the creation of the CNRS, the Musée d’art of Paris, the Réunion des Théâtres Lyriques Nationaux and the Cannes Film Festival. That he will resign in 1939 and will be part, like Georges Mandel and Pierre Mendès France, of the twenty-seven parliamentarians who embark in Bordeaux on the Massilia, in the hope of continuing the war from North Africa.

Accused of “desertion in the presence of the enemy”, judged expeditiously, Jean Zay was condemned to perpetual deportation – the sentence, never pronounced since Dreyfus, turned into imprisonment. “He was everything that Pétain hated: a Jew through his father, a Freemason, a partisan of resistance to Hitler from 1933, hostile to the Munich Accords, Minister of the Popular Front of Léon Blum, also hated”, recalls today her daughter.

Shocking testimonies

In his prison in Riom (Puy-de-Dôme), the former radical minister would write what remains one of the most moving testimonies of the years of Occupation (Souvenirs et solitude, 1945, republished by Belin, 2017), and also , and every day, letters to “my mother,” says Hélène; a mother who, in 1948, will have to go and recognize the body of her husband, murdered by the Militia in June 1944.

In the second episode, she recalls that it will be a long time before France faces its responsibility: “At the time, we glorify Free France and the Resistance, but the crimes of Vichy remain buried. Married to a poet, Claude Mouchard, Hélène Zay became a teacher: she was a woman committed to her time (Algerian war, May 68, episode 3).

Later (episode 4), while Jean-Marie Le Pen declares that the gas chambers are “a point of detail in the history of the Second World War” (1987), while the Jewish cemetery of Carpentras (Vaucluse) Is Profaned (1990), Hélène Mouchard-Zay has “a sense of absolute urgency”.

In 1991, she founded the Center for Study and Research on Internment Camps in Loiret: Beaune-la-Rolande, Pithiviers and Jargeau. “I am one of those people who think that the memory of the Holocaust will never be self-evident, that it must be written in stone. And to insist on “the absolute duty to give young people intellectual tools to combat prejudice of all kinds: anti-Semitic, racist, sexist”.

Today, we must salute her commitment and her stubbornness (“the only quality that I recognize in myself”, she says), and thus by her summed up: “You must not give in to anything. »