- Welcome - A few words

A few words

A thought for Mr. Jack Delavenne, my teacher who became Principal, a few months after traveling to Italy and another to the Czech Republic. You gave us the desire to learn in the best of manners.

Traveling, whether to go back in time through research to reconstruct a few fragments of history or through exploration in other countries, brings us a new look at our own culture, and we come back from it grown and transformed.

Look, work of the eye,
observe, work of the mind,
contemplate, work of the soul,
whoever arrives at this third level, enters the realm of art.

Emile Bernard

I remember those 463 steps that we had climbed with an assured step to reach the top of the Duomo with a view of the interior of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in Florence. We arrived up there breathless but were rewarded by this impressive view.

For our visit to Terezín in the Czech Republic, I remember the silence that fell in the ranks when we crossed this first corridor containing the drawings by these children.

I remember this bunkhouse that we entered, which was used as a dormitory for the prisoners and had three levels. I didn't feel this emptiness that day; on the contrary, Everyone should make this pilgrimage once in their life. Thank you for making this possible.

I had the opportunity to speak with a survivor of these death camps, a resistance fighter, a few years later. I had done some research for him because he wanted to know if his comrades present on this deportation train had survived.

He also spoke of his release in Germany and about those local citizens who were terrified to see those shadows coming out of the camps. When I told him about my visit to Theresienstadt, he had tears in his eyes. For the rest of his life, he wanted to bear witness to these events and to the dangerousness of certain ideological currents, hoping that future generations would go in the right direction.

"A generation which ignores history has no past - and no future.“