The key facts
- Mélanie Berger-Volle, born in Vienna in 1921, died at the age of 105 — local authorities reported on Sunday.
- In 1942 she was arrested, spent 13 months in prison, and in October 1943 escaped from a prison in Marseille.
- At the age of 102 she carried the Olympic torch ahead of the Paris 2024 Games.
Resistance member dies at 105
Austrian-born French Resistance member Mélanie Berger-Volle has died at the age of 105, local authorities reported on Sunday. Loire region prefect François-Xavier Bieuville called her 'an iconic figure of the Resistance and a tireless keeper of memory.'
Flight from Austria and arrest
Berger-Volle was born in 1921 in Vienna into a working-class family. As a Jew with ties to left-wing groups, she hastily left Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany. After France entered the war, all Austrians, including refugees, came to be regarded as enemies, and she was sent by train to a camp near Pau. As she said in an interview with AFP in 2024, at the Clermont-Ferrand station she jumped out of the train car — the other girls did not dare follow her example. When the Nazis occupied France, she joined a left-wing group that distributed leaflets in German calling on the occupation forces to switch sides. Under the code names 'Anna' and 'Nelly' she was arrested in January 1942 and, as she recalled, was beaten during interrogations.
Prison escape
After 13 months of imprisonment in the Toulouse prison, she was transferred to the Les Baumettes prison in Marseille. Her comrades, together with the French Resistance, organized an escape: on October 15, 1943, while she was in hospital with jaundice, they came for her accompanied by a German soldier who had defected to their side. 'I escaped in my nightgown,' she recounted.
Memory preservation work
After the war, Berger-Volle, together with her husband Lucien Volle, also a Resistance member, worked to preserve the memory of those events and continued visiting schools into old age. 'We constantly worked to explain not what we did, but why we did it,' she said. 'One must resist. It is better to live standing than on one's knees.' At the age of 102 she carried the Olympic torch ahead of the Paris 2024 Games, saying she wanted to be a symbol for women 'who fought for the right to do sports on equal terms with men.'
