PORTRAIT – Film, book, comic book… Philippe Maynial has done remarkable work to ensure that the acts of resistance of his aunt, Madeleine Pauliac, at the head of the blue squadron during the Second World War, are known.
The first time that Philippe Maynial heard the story of his aunt Madeleine’s life was from his mother, Anne-Marie Pauliac, in 1955. The boy was then 7 years old and had relatively little interest in the dramatic family memories of the two world wars. There was, in the living room of the Pauliac family’s Villeneuve-sur-Lot mansion, a painted portrait of his maternal grandfather, a midshipman who died in Verdun in 1916, and a photo of lieutenant doctor Madeleine Pauliac with, in image, his Legion of Honor and his war cross with palm. The young doctor from the Hospital for Sick Children died in the accident of her official car at the Quai d’Orsay, on an icy road in Poland, 60 km from Warsaw, on February 13, 1946.
After much resistance in the framework of the Sick Children’s Hospital (helping Allied airmen and Jews hiding in her home), Doctor Madeleine Pauliac, then aged 32, enlisted in September 1944 as a medical lieutenant…
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