On May 18th - day 9 of our trip - we went to Lyon for the Centre d'Histoire de la Resistance et de la Deportation. The museum focused on WWII history concerning the French Resistance movement and deportation of citizens.
Lyon is the second largest city in France and it's where the Gestapo was based during WWII - with Klaus Barbie as its leader. Klaus is famous for being "The Butcher of Lyon" during the war itself, then afterwards working as an intelligence agent for the US. When he was almost arrested for his war crimes, he escaped to Bolivia. He returned around 1979 and was sentenced to life in prison in 1987. He ended up dying not too long after that from natural causes.
So this museum was in the same building - Hotel Terminus - where Barbie operated from between 1942 and 1944. This put the museum into the appropriate eerie context for the subject of the museum.
While no pictures were allowed in the museum, I remember one image that stuck out to me as we walked through. This picture is a caricature of Hitler drawn in 1942 by the French Periodical "Pour la Victoire" and it was published in New York. It's called "Le nouveau Moloch."
I found the museum to be incredibly powerful. There were videos with personal stories of triumph as well as tragedy with the resistance, and there were also newspaper articles and pictures showing realities versus propaganda produced by the government. As a token, I bought a Resistance pin on my way out for one euro to represent myself as part of this important historical movement.
-Katie Gordon
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