Has Marseille Forgotten Nancy Wake?
A View Across Marseille (all images clickable to enlarge)
One of the things I wanted to find in Marseille was a plaque dedicated to Nancy Wake. According to my notes, it was somewhere on the Ibis hotel near Gare Saint-Charles.
So one very hot afternoon I walked up from my hotel through the narrow streets towards the station. It was the first time I climbed the famous staircase of Gare Saint-Charles and looked out over Marseille. Standing there, with the city spread out before me, I couldn't help thinking that this had once been Nancy's city.
From there I followed my navigation to the hotel. Finding the hotel was easy. Finding the plaque wasn't.
A Tiny Plaque
I walked all around the building without seeing anything. Eventually I went inside, partly because I hoped it would be cooler than outside, but also to ask at reception. Nobody knew anything about a plaque, which seemed odd to me. But as it was really supposed to be here, I went outside again and searched a second time. Still nothing.
Across the street I noticed a police officer. Perhaps he would know. As I asked in my slightly improved French, he shook his head. Never heard of a plaque. Never heard of Nancy Wake.
But instead of simply shrugging his shoulders, he said he’d help me look because now he was curious too. Together we searched every corner of the hotel until eventually we spotted something about two metres above our heads.
It was tiny. So tiny that neither of us could read it from the pavement. Fortunately, the police officer was taller than I was. He took a photograph with my phone and only then could I read the inscription.
Click to enlarge
The plaque had only been unveiled in 2015, four years after Nancy's death, by the Australian Ambassador to France after staying at the hotel. No wonder we had struggled to find it. And the police officer laughed that he’d worked in the office across the street for years and had never noticed it either.
I thanked him for his help, went back inside the hotel and showed the photograph to the reception staff. Suddenly it rang a bell.
"Oh yes..."
One Last Address
By then the heat had really begun to catch up with m so I asked the hotel to call me a taxi. As I waited, I thought there was one final place connected to Nancy that I wanted to see. After her marriage, she and Henri Fiocca had lived at 5 Rue Édouard Stephan in the 4th Arrondissement.
I asked the taxi driver whether he could drive me past the address. At first, he mumbled something that sounded very much like "no, that’s not permitted." Then, after a moment's thought, he must have changed his mind, because after taking endless roads left and right, he suddenly announced.
"We're here."
I looked out of the window. It looked like a very ordinary street to me that bordered on a small park. Not anything fancy and expensive, which I had also already wriggled out of the taxi driver. No not a posh area perse, never had been. Henri Fiocca? The successful industrialist? Somehow, I had imagined something grander. Instead, it looked like an ordinary neighbourhood.
But it was clear that the building where they used to live had long since disappeared, replaced by a modern apartment block. I took a photograph of the house anyway, because what else could I do? By now, I suspect the taxi driver thought I was a rather odd passenger anyway.
Opposite what used to have been their house, stood an old tree so I also took a picture of that hoping that stood there already when Nancy looked out of the window. But who knows?
A City That Had Moved On
As the taciturn taxi driver drove me back towards the Vieux-Port, I couldn't help thinking how strange this afternoon had been. Nancy Wake had once carried the highest bounty on her head offered by the Gestapo. 5 million Francs. She is remembered throughout the world as the White Mouse, the famous WW2 resistance fighter. She’d kept that image of herself alive for decades, but it seemed to have faded after her death.
Here, in the city where so much of her resistance work begun, I’d found remarkably little that still spoke of her. A tiny plaque almost nobody knew existed. A house that no longer stood.
Marseille, it seemed, had quietly moved on. At that moment I thought my search for traces of Nancy Wake had come to an end. They had.
But I had no idea that the following day I would stumble upon something that will keep her memory alive in my mind forever.
