Mélanie Berger-Volle

Melanie Berger was born on 8 October 1921 in Vienna, Austria, into a Jewish family and grew up in the Leopoldstadt district. She said she knew from the age of 12 or 13 that she wanted to change the world and could never accept that some people thought themselves better because of skin colour or religion. During the February 1934 fighting in Vienna she crossed the Danube to bring buttered bread to the people on the barricades, according to her biographer Nils Klawitter. Politically shaped by the labour movement, she joined the banned Revolutionary Socialists of Austria as a schoolgirl, attending meetings held on a nudist beach in the Lobau to avoid the police, and then the anti-Stalinist Revolutionary Communists of Austria (RKÖ), whose founders included Georg Scheuer, Josef Hindels, Karl Fischer and Ernst Federn.

She completed secondary school (Hauptschule) in Vienna and then trained as a dressmaker, learning the trade of corset making. Sewing and garment work later helped her survive in exile and after the war, when she worked in the clothing trade, sold knitwear at markets and, in Vienna, managed a fashion shop.

After the Anschluss in March 1938 she fled in May 1938 via Germany to Antwerp, Belgium, where she lived illegally. In spring 1939 she crossed into France disguised as a male cross-border worker. Treated as an enemy alien when war broke out, she was sent to Clermont-Ferrand and escaped internment at Gurs by working as a maid, while keeping the RKÖ network in contact between Antwerp, Les Milles, London, Zurich and New York. In 1940 she moved to Montauban, where she made and distributed German-language anti-Hitler leaflets aimed at Wehrmacht soldiers.

On 26 January 1942 French police arrested her. She was beaten in Montauban, held in Saint-Michel prison in Toulouse and on 18 December 1942 sentenced to 15 years of hard labour and a 20-year ban for "communist and anarchist activities". Moved to Les Baumettes in Marseille, she faced the threat of the Gestapo searching Vichy prisons for political detainees. On 15 October 1943, while she was in the prison hospital with acute jaundice, an RKÖ commando including Ignaz Duhl, Gustav Gronich, Lotte Israel and Georg Scheuer, together with a Wehrmacht soldier willing to desert, freed her using forged Gestapo papers. She then joined the French Resistance in Lyon under false names and was briefly arrested again in Paris shortly before the Liberation. Her pseudonyms included "Anna" and "Nelly".

After the war she lived stateless in Paris. On 15 July 1947 she married the teacher Roger Essel and gained French citizenship. After the loss of a small child the couple moved to Madagascar, where she worked in a laboratory; they separated in 1957 and divorced in 1958. While visiting her parents in Vienna she met the French journalist and former resistance leader Lucien Volle, known as "Capitaine Lulu". They married on 14 June 1965, lived in Vienna, then moved to Paris in 1967 and Drancy in 1969, where she worked for the municipality. They retired to Brives-Charensac in Haute-Loire in 1982. Lucien Volle died on 4 August 2012, after which she lived in a senior residence in Saint-Étienne. Austrian radio Ö1 named the French Olympic gymnast Emilie Volle as her granddaughter.

She described herself as a rebel from childhood who opposed every form of dictatorship. Her politics were internationalist and anti-Stalinist; she rejected both the Social Democrats, who she felt had failed in 1934, and the Moscow-line Communists because of Stalin's show trials. In later life she urged young people to choose democracy, which she defined as freedom for all, and in 2024 she publicly called on voters to oppose the Rassemblement National. In 2026 she told Le Progrès that people had forgotten what happened and that fascist movements hostile to foreigners were still present.

For more than a decade after her husband's death she carried on alone as a witness in schools in France and Austria, working with the Mémorial de la Résistance et de la Déportation de la Loire and the Haus der Geschichte Österreich. Her story is told in Nils Klawitter's biography Die kleine Sache Widerstand (Czernin, 2024), its French translation La petite main de la résistance (Robert Laffont, 2026, translated by Jean-Claude Mourlevat), a 2026 comic book by Clément Goutelle and Johan Lagrange (Jarjille), and oral history interviews held by the Österreichische Mediathek and weitererzaehlen.at.

Knight of the Ordre national du Mérite (2002). Knight of the Legion of Honour (decree of 12 July 2013). Golden Decoration of Merit of the Republic of Austria (presented 19 June 2015 by Ambassador Ursula Plassnik). Gold Medal of Honour of the City of Vienna (12 September 2024, from Mayor Michael Ludwig). Commander of the Ordre des Palmes académiques (appointed 24 December 2025, insignia presented 7 April 2026 by General Thierry Burkhard). Also the Médaille des évadés, the Croix du combattant volontaire de la Résistance and other resistance decorations. She was the senior member of the Loire section of the Legion of Honour members' society.

She appeared in many filmed interviews, including for the Austrian Cultural Forum Paris, France Inter and the Haus der Geschichte Österreich. Her Olympic torch relay at 102 in Saint-Étienne on 22 June 2024 was covered by AFP, France 24 and Austrian media. Ö1 radio devoted a programme to her in June 2024.

Mélanie Berger-Volle died in France during the night of 21 to 22 October 2026, a few days after her 105th birthday, as reported by Der Standard on 22 October 2026. She had lived in Saint-Étienne until the end. The cause of death has not been made public.