On this day, 23 July 1944, 19-year-old French communist resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud saw a German military officer taking a walk over a bridge on the river Seine in Paris and got off her bicycle. As he looked at the Louvre, she took out her gun and shot him twice in the head, killing him. As she cycled away, she was pursued and knocked off her bike by French collaborators in a car. Riffaud tried to shoot herself to avoid torture but was captured and handed over to the Nazi SS. She was beaten repeatedly, escaped but was recaptured and deported to a concentration camp. There, she was released in a prisoner swap, and took part in the armed uprising which liberated the city in August.
She later recounted to Agence France-Presse in an interview, “It was joyous… People were falling in love and kissing each other without knowing each other. After years of having to do everything in secret, we could fight in the open.”
Riffaud survived the war and later became a journalist, supporting and reporting on anti-colonial rebellions in Algeria and Vietnam.
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An underground town by the name Coober Pedy is a small mining town with a population of just under 2,000, but it’s also the “opal capital of the world” and has been supplying most of the world’s gem-quality opal since it was founded in 1915. In this waterless environment, not much activity goes on above ground and instead, the community exists in a network of tunnels underneath the desert earth, inside some 1,500 homes and dwellings they call their “dug-outs.” (Via)
ZOMBIE LAKE (1981) US movie poster, French movie poster & Wizard Video poster and box art.
Zombie Lake (french title: Le lac des morts vivants) is a 1981 Spanish-French horror film directed by Jean Rollin and Julian de Laserna. The film starred Howard Vernon as the mayor of a small French town that is plagued by Nazi zombies who were killed by the town’s villagers 20 years earlier. It was distributed by Eurociné.
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