Two weeks ago, when the University of Sussex announced Rod's award of an honorary degree (Doctor of Letters), it also made public the news of the impending creation of a Centre of Resistance Studies plus an Archive of Resistance Testimony: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/staff/newsandevents/?id=17418
Needless to say we're thrilled … and Rod's 100+ audio interviews plus my own filmed oral histories will be the first collections donated to the Archive of Resistance Testimony. I will also be working closely with the Director of the new Centre on the gathering of further testimony and also on outreach initiatives.
It was clear in the interviews featured in last evening's film that "Resistance" in occupied France meant a lot more than blowing up railway tracks or telephone lines … the word also covers many other acts which were just as dangerous to those who undertook them and also their families, such as hiding a Jewish family, Allied evader or agent, listening to the BBC and passing on news or a 'message personnel', helping get food to the local maquis, or distributing an anti-German leaflet.
First-hand accounts of these experiences, and in fact just memories of day-to-day family and working life during the Occupation, are all of great interest to academics and also to the writers of novels set in that era. A very recent example is Kate Mosse's latest novel Citadel about women resistors in SW France - with Rod Kedward's work cited as one of the author's key research sources.
So at our local level it would be great if we could come up with a formal proposition to all interested British ex-pats in the area, and also further afield, that they could link up with French neighbours and friends in order to research and record local wartime experiences while those with the memories are still able to recall these. Many who were adults during the occupation will be dead by now, but their children who would have been teenagers or younger during the war may not.
Some families may already have memoirs written by relatives, and also wartime photos and even artefacts, but these may all get "poubelled" by the next generation without realising their significance. So if local French people are found who do have personal memories of the occupation, and resistance in particular, then their recollections could be simply filmed, or digitally recorded - and staff and pupils or students from a local school or college could even get involved in each project.
I can easily arrange advice on basic techniques for filming, audio recording and scanning using equipment which many people will already own, and so I hope this is something we can discuss next time.
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