She is one of the rare centenarians to have received the Legion of Honor: Geneviève Callerot, who died Thursday at the age of 108 in Dordogne, was distinguished in 2018 for having helped with her family to transition to the free zone more than 200 people during the Second World War.
This peasant, who became a retired writer, then received the AFP in her Perigourdine farm, where she lived for several more years, before ending her days in a nursing home in Saint-Aulaye-Puymangou.
“I didn’t want it (the Legion of Honor) because there are lots of other people who deserved it much more and then I thought, I’m still going to take it in association with my parents , my brothers and sisters »explained the centenarian, born in 1916 in Paris, with her glasses around her neck and her hearing aids.
From the occupied Dordogne, they brought Jews of course and also any other person who wanted to enter the free zone, a few kilometers from their house. The people who arrived at their homes in Saint-Aulaye, between Libourne (Gironde) and Périgueux, were too exhausted to leave the same day.
Arrested three times
They accompanied them the next day, always between 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. “At the beginning we counted. There were more than 200, that’s for sure.”specified Geneviève in 2018 who kept many anecdotes.
Geneviève Callerot on her tractor on her farm in Saint-Aulaye, in Dordogne, August 25, 2018 / MEHDI FEDOUACH / AFP/Archives
“I had a woman pass and I was quite furious. She arrived in red shorts and a yellow blouse. No one ever had shorts here, and in red and yellow, you could see it a mile away. I made her wear a dark skirt, she was furious but I held my ground”she remembered.
“Why was she passing? I found out later. She was Jewish and there was a price on her head. She was the wife of a doctor who was not Jewish..
But it was not without risk. The young woman was arrested three times. “The first time, I was on the road with my bicycle”said Geneviève, who always carried a bag of nettles and a sickle in case she was controlled by the Germans.
“I explained with a lot of +cocorico+ and +coin quack+ that I was picking nettles because they were taking everything from us. I don’t know if he understood that I was collecting nettles to feed my +coin quack+ and my +cocorico+! »smiled the centenarian who still got on her tractor to mow the grass and liked to walk barefoot.
“A shadow fighter”
The third time, she spent three weeks in prison in Libourne: “I wasn’t just smuggling escapees. It was a cousin of my mother who was 56 years old and a young man of 17 who was returning from vacation”.
“When we were arrested, we were in the woods. I said I was going to see my fiancé. I invented a fiancé, Jacques Martin. By the time they list all the Martins of France…”remembered Geneviève with her laughing blue eyes.
Geneviève Callerot poses with her latest novel “Two girls under the boot” on her farm, August 25, 2018 in Saint-Aulaye, Dordogne / MEHDI FEDOUACH / AFP/Archives
She was the eldest of five children. At the time of receiving the Legion of Honor, only her brother Étienne Morise, 19 years younger than her, was still alive.
“She put up a lot of resistance during the war. She was not a warrior but she was a fighter, a shadow fighter. She took a lot of risks, my father and her sister too”estimated the little brother, who died in 2024.
“She was inexhaustible and loved sharing her story with the local schoolchildren”the mayor of Saint-Aulaye-Puymangou, Yannick Lagrenaudie, told AFP on Friday.
At the time of her retirement from farming, this mother of three children had also begun to write, at the age of 63, “peasant novels”.
His sixth and final book, “Two girls under the boot, chronicle of a family during the occupation”was written from 600 letters exchanged during the war, “because soon no one will be able to say: I saw… I was there…”