© Mark Mühlhaus
Pascale Evans is the daughter of Pascal Valliccioni who was arrested for being active in the French resistance and deported to Germany. He survived his imprisonment and lived to tell his story. His daughter answered our questions about what remembrance work means to her and what values she wants to pass on to her children.
How did you learn about your father’s story?
I can’t remember the exact moment during my childhood when I learned that my father had been a resistance fighter and deported to Germany. I have the feeling that I’ve always known. When I had to do a presentation on the Second World War in high school, I naturally asked him some questions. But he preferred to write a testimonial that he asked me to read to the class after the presentation.
His account ended with a plea for humanism, respect for others and reconciliation. I still feel very strongly about it.
My father always answered the questions we asked him. But he never initiated a conversation about his deportation.
Everything I learnt as a child came indirectly, through reading interviews or articles about him, books about concentration camps, talking to my mother after watching a documentary about concentration camps.
Later, I accompanied my father to many gatherings and pilgrimages and got to know his fellow deportees, and it was by listening to them talk that I really learned about the horrors of the deportation. That is how I became aware of the importance of the remembrance work former deportees took upon themselves following their return from concentration camps. My father used to say that “the duty to remember means to ensure that we never forget all those who sacrificed themselves to defend these values [humanism, respect for others and reconciliation] in order to prevent, denounce and condemn attacks on human dignity”.
What influence does your family history have on the person you are today?
Probably an important one!
When your father is a role model, a hero, you owe it to yourself to be worthy of him, to uphold and defend the same values.
This has an impact on your behavior and your everyday relationships with others: respect for others and their dignity are non-negotiable!
And that’s what I want to pass on to my children.
Furthermore, as the daughter of a deportee, I also understood that I would have a role to play in the work of remembrance. And that the same will be true for my children.
I know that this work will forever be part of my life and my commitments.
What elements of your family history and values will you pass on to the next generation(s)?
My children were lucky enough to know their grandfather well and to attend gatherings of deportees and commemorations from a very early age. They also took part in a pilgrimage with their grandfather.
So, they know his story; they have read his testimony and his speeches. They heard him tell his story, they saw him unable to speak, overwhelmed by emotion as he recounted his arrival at the Sandbostel camp during the “death marches”. They knew some of his fellow deportees.
Their family history and upbringing have:
- made them advocates for the humanist cause so important to my father and all his comrades
- instilled respect for and openness to others as key principles of human relations
- enabled them to understand the absolute need to fight against oblivion and the duty to remember: they will continue to pass on the history of the concentration camp universe.
Pascal Valliccioni with his 2 granddaughters, Maëlle (left) and Laureen (right), pilgrimage 2015 to Sandbostel
© Pascale Evans
© Pascale Evans
How did you come to be involved in the French Amicale de Neuengamme? What does your involvement mean to you?
How can one get past the tragedy that my father and his comrades experienced?
I’m going to quote a passage from one of my father’s speeches: “I want the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the victims and those of our former tormentors to be united in the same fight against barbarity. This is what we deportees call the remembrance work. The duty to remember means to ensure that we never forget all those who sacrificed themselves to defend these values in order to prevent, denounce and condemn attacks on human dignity.
I hope that the dead will continue to teach the living. May we, the survivors of the camps, who fade with the passing of time, instill this indispensable duty to remember in all people of today and tomorrow and for all eternity”.
Not to get involved, not to commit, would mean to betray him.
About
Pascal Valliccioni
written by Pascale Evans
My father, Pascal Valliccioni, became a resistance fighter at the age of 16, out of a sense of duty regardless of political affiliations and philosophical beliefs.
Over the Easter holidays in 1943, he took refuge with his mother in a small village in the Upper Alps to wait out the war. His father stayed in Marseille for work.
A few days after he arrived in the village, he became a so-called shadow fighter, acting as a liaison and supplier for recusants, namely people who refused to comply with the Compulsory Labor Service (STO) introduced by the Vichy government in February 1943.
In early 1944, he was denounced to the Gestapo and took to the scrublands (maquis), where recusants (the Maquis) escaped to avoid being deported to Germany and get organized. Four months later, on April 5, 1944, they were attacked by two hundred German soldiers. The attack lasted five hours and ended in the arrest of my father and five other resistance fighters.
On September 1, 1944, he was deported to the Neuengamme concentration camp and a few days later transferred to the Wilhelmshaven satellite camp on the North Sea coast. He was 17 years old. He returned to France on July 5, 1945. He was one of 141 French survivors out of the 541 in this camp that held 1,250 prisoners who had arrived from Neuengamme.
