Colette Marin-Catherine

Colette Marin-Catherine (born 25 April 1929), is a French resistance fighter from Bretteville-l'Orgueilleuse. She joined the Resistance in the summer of 1944 where she was a reconnaissance agent and then a nurse after the Normandy landings; also resistant, her brother Jean-Pierre Catherine was arrested in 1943 and died in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in 1945.

After the war, she pursued memorial work. She rose to prominence when Anthony Giacchino's short documentary Colette, which follows her on a visit to Dora's camp where her brother died, won the Oscar in its category at the 93rd Academy Awards.

Biography Origins Colette Marin-Catherine was born in 1929 in Calvados in Normandy, in the village of Bretteville-l'Orgueilleuse where her family resided. and 16-year old Colette Marin-Catherine joined the French Resistance around Caen as a reconnaissance agent. During the summer of 1944,

Her brother Jean-Pierre Catherine, born in 1926 and a student at the school for aspirants of the Merchant Navy in Caen, joined the Resistance in 1940 at 13 years old with a group of comrades from Bretteville-l'Orgueilleuse and Putot-en-Bessin. They distributed newspapers, leaflets, hid weapons and helped opponents to camouflage themselves. On November 11, 1942, they flowered the war memorials. For this fact, Jean-Pierre Catherine was arrested eight months later. He was imprisoned in Caen, where he was sentenced to forced labor. First sent to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in annexed Alsace, under extremely harsh working conditions. on March 22, 1945, at just 19 years old. Another brother, named Gaston, thirteen years older than Colette Marin-Catherine, dies on his return from deportation.

After the War On September 28, 1944, Colette Marin-Catherine and her mother left the Bayeux military hospital and returned home for the first time since D-Day. They had to walk for fifteen kilometers. They found their house squatted, looted and in poor condition. mainly in Caen at Mémorial de Caen and at Café Mancel and receives Americans on each anniversary of the D-Day.

The team of the film offered Colette Marin-Catherine a commemorative paving stone in memory of her brother, called Stolperstein, made by the German artist Gunter Demnig. It was sealed on November 11, 2019, in front of the family home in Bretteville-l'Orgueilleuse. This was the first Stolperstein affixed in Normandy.