Josette Torrent just celebrated her 93rd birthday, but her life changed much earlier, when she lived in Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales) with her parents. One night, on her way home from college, she finds her father, Michel, lying on the kitchen floor, feeling sick. He asks her to bring a secret document. She later finds out that he is part of the Gallia resistance network. “I had never heard that word before, I thought it was the name of a new clothing store since he worked in a ready-to-wear store, she smiled. He made me promise to keep it a secret. I shouldn't tell anyone, not my friends or my sister, not even my mother. »
The pact is sealed. She goes to a tunnel between Saint-Assiscle and the Perpignan station and, as arranged, she passes the document to a man in a hat who whistles the song. With my girlfriend. Everything went according to plan. Josette was then 12 years, 4 months and 17 days old when she carried out this first mission, which made her, until proven otherwise, the youngest liaison officer in the Resistance.
A double life that he killed for fifty years before counting it in the book I was 12 years old and I was resistant, co-written by Johanna Cincinatis and Olivier Montégut, published in April by HarperCollins. Gifted at being discreet, she brings other messages without anyone suspecting a thing. At Torrents we don't ask questions. “I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. Michel told me: “The less you know, the better you are”. And if I had been caught, I wouldn't have been able to say much.", she points out. One thing's for sure, she was never scared, too “delighted to be able to do something to get the Boches out”.
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High "like a child by its father" Josette Torrent learned to fish and sail with him in Saint-Malo, where she lived from the age of 4 to 10, until the sound of German boots convinced the family to go down to the free zone. In Perpignan, she trains to encode messages on postcards and to accompany the resisters who want to reach Spain acting as a scout with her bicycle. If she meets a German patrol on the way, she pretends that she is lost, while the resistance fighters hide in the bush with her father. “No one suspects a girl”, she observes
At school, he never takes his eyes off his geography atlas. Not out of interest in the material, but because his father made a lining there to slide the papers destined for the Resistance. Again, Josette does not ask anything. "It may not be very curious, but as long as it was not necessary to ask for too many explanations, I kept quiet," she clarifies. She is still sitting on a bench in a garden near the station, with her books and notebooks. The men take her places next to her, pretend to read the newspaper, whisper the password to her, and take the atlas from the supply pile, trading it for an identical copy.
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