The Museum of the Resistance

---

The area around Grenoble was a hot spot of Resistance activity during WWII with the mountains providing an ideal base. Today are plan is to visit the Museum of the Resistence and get a sense of some of this history.
After making a quick trip out to the Boulangerie to pick up croissants for breakfast, we got a good start and were out of the apartment relatively early. After making a trip to the post office to mail some school work back to Canada for marking, we made our way to the museum.

The museum, it turned out, was free which is always nice. It is quite well set up with displays labeled in multiple languages. It has a sort of somber feel too it, befitting of a place that not only tells the history of the Resistance but in a way, memorializes the many of them that died in the struggle.

Looking upon artifacts such as the radios used for secret communication, the guns used, and the detonation devices used in sabotage was quite captivating. The museum goes a good job of explaining the context too, outlining the stages that the occupation went through and the escalation of the resistance when the territory around Grenoble passed from the occupying Italians to the occupying Germans.

Vintage posters, newspapers, and propaganda materials surround the display cases and give you a good sense of what the times were like. In particular, one poster designed to encourage French men to do a stint in German factories was quite a good example of the propaganda style.

The museum shows how the resistance build from individual groups of people and one room shows this well by showing five chairs around a table, each labeled with a name of one such small group and detailing how they began and what became of them. This seems to personalize the experience and make you see that it was made up of individual acts and decisions.

The museum gave a good job too, of showing how the concentration camps played into the history of the region, and how many Jews and other “undesirables” were gradually stripped of rights and sent off to the camps.

A rather haunting portion of the display has three doors from the Gestapo holding cells were many of the captured Resistance fighters where held and tortured before being shipped off to camps or killed. The have lifted the graffiti and carvings from these doors and replicated them on plexiglass. These show the hopes, calenders, and final thought of the prisoners that were held in those cells. Calendars scrawled on the wood that track the days and months and then just end, leave a chill in your spine.

Towards the end of the tour, there is a temporary display dealing with the genocide in Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 -1979. Having visited Cambodia in December, this made a strong connection and particularly chilling was a photo of a family, pre-genocide, standing in front of Angkor Wat where we had been. Next to that is a photo showing the surviving members of that family years later. I thought including this Cambodia display was an excellent way of reminding people that things like the holocaust are not just something that happened, but rather something that continues to happen. I sort of regret that we did not taking a trip to the killing fields when we were in Phnom Penh, as hard as that might have been.

Back at the apartment, we had some lunch and did school work. We also spent some time on the internet, contacting British friends of Evy whom we hope to visit as well as contacting a friend of Joshua's whose family has moved to Switzerland for a few years.

It poured rain heavily in the evening. Joshua commented that he feels he is beginning to understand French tv a bit better. Benjamin was on the computer, downloading the newest “Green Day” album.

---