On 26 March 2024, Museum of the Second World War hosted two speakers. Claire Mulley, a British author, gave a lecture on Krystyna Skarbek, a Polish agent of the British SOE. Julien Guillon, a museologist and curator from the Vercors Resistance Memorial, spoke about the French resistance movement in the south of France. 

As part of the series ‘Living History’, we first publish the text of a lecture by Julien Guillon, researching the history of the French resistance movement in the Vercors in southern France.

The lecture discusses the history of the resistance movement in the south of France, little known to general public, also describing events in which Polish citizens were directly involved.

In the Vercors region, in the village of Villard de Lans, there was a Polish high school named after K.C. Norwid. A total of around 800 pupils passed through this Lycée. Some of them later took direct part in the battles against the Germans, including helping to build an airstrip for Allied airdrops of arms and supplies for French partisans.