Eugène Taly, Lodévois and hero of the Resistance of War 39-45

After the death of her father, Mireille (here with her husband Henri) was placed in an orphanage until the age of 16.

Mireille Guarch a été reconnue fille de déporté, pupille de la Nation et orpheline de guerre.

En cette période commémorative, la Lodévoise Mireille se souvient de son père.

Born in 1940, Mireille Taly, wife of Guarch, remembers the 39-45 war. She talks about her father Eugène (1913-1948), a Lodévois and hero of the resistance. A town hall secretary, he made false papers, hid weapons within the Koufra maquis, participated in sabotage… He was denounced and arrested at his workplace in Lodève town hall on April 5, 1944. Transported to the Villa des Rosiers, a place of torture in Montpellier, interned in Toulouse, he was deported to Germany to Buchenwald. When he returned to Lodève in 1945, he weighed 30 kg. Suffering from tuberculosis, he entered medicine at the city hospital where he died on September 10, 1948.

A street named after him

Eugène Taly had three children: Jacqueline, Mireille and Hubert. “I would escape every morning before going to school to see my father. There were people who would bring him sweets. Since I was greedy, he would give me sweets for my little brother and me”, remembers Mireille. When their father died, she and her little brother were placed in the hospital orphanage. Jacqueline, the eldest, was sick and went to a preventorium, then she was raised by an aunt who, unable to have children, considered her a daughter. "My mother was not capable of raising us. So I stayed in the orphanage from the age of 4 to 16. There were many other children in the same situation. My mother worked odd jobs to make a living. I almost never knew her.

Then Mireille went to La Colline (housekeeping center) in Montpellier for 2 years. "I spent my life locked up until the age of 20". Recognized as the daughter of a deportee, ward of the Nation and war orphan, she married Henri Guarch: "As the daughter of a deportee, I was given 100 francs, like a dowry of sorts!"

Henri came from Spain to Lodève with his parents in 1939 (the year of his birth). His father Julien was a weaver and he quickly found work in the factory. When the war broke out, he had to go and work on a farm to replace the men who had been drafted. Julien Guarch and his wife Carmen had 5 children. "We didn't experience the war badly, we had a garden, there were cows for milk and my father poached&quot ;, says Henri.

But for the Taly children whose father had died as a result of the deportation, no help was provided. exempted. "The children have been forgotten by the Republic".

In Lodève, he There is a rue Eugène-Taly which runs from the entrance to the park to the place of the old post office. "We were invited to the installation of a plaque detailing his past as a resistance fighter with Marie-Christine Bousquet, then mayor of Lodève", specifies Henri.

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