Each week with RetroNews the BNF press site, a look back at a sporting story as told by the press of the time. This Saturday, Tola Vologe, field hockey player converted to athletics coach in Lyon then resistant, shot by the Germans in 1944.
Who, apart from supporters of Olympique Lyonnais, and still not the youngest, knows the name of Tola Vologe? And who among them knows who was the man who gave their name to the old training center of their club? Short answer: a great sportsman and a great resistant. Let’s develop.
A great athlete. Born in Vilnius, Lithuania (Russia at the time) on May 25, 1909, from his real first name Anatole, he wore the jersey of the French team, his adopted country which he joined with his mother, little before the First World War, in three different sports. Not bad. Especially since these three disciplines have little to do with each other and they require very different physical and mental qualities. Tola Vologe was international in a collective sport, field hockey, in another of confrontation, table tennis and a third solitary, athletics.
It’s stock in hand, the trunk tilted at 45 degrees – hello kidney pain – to run after and hit in a small ball, that Tola Vologe has especially shone: forty (numbers vary depending on the source) of selections in the French hockey team, including twenty times as captain – he finished fourth at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. On the cinder, he held the national record for the 400m and twice represented France. He also tapped on a small celluloid ball in the name of the fatherland, at the time when it was living a real “ping-pong mania”.
Vologe was introduced to hockey at the age of 12, at the Stade Français, to which he remained faithful for most of his career. The Parisian club carried out an almost total raid on the French titles in the 1930s. However, he left it in 1937. Renowned as a big mouth and heart of gold, he has a character, say, whole and scrap regularly with those who he calls “The federates”, white-collar workers who manage the sport from their offices. So the Petit Journal of November 13, 1937 announces that “Vologe will now play at the Antwerp Berschot. […] As we can see, the turbulent “Tola” did not digest his disqualification by the FFH [Fédération française de hockey].» He will quickly return to his heart club. In 1939, the Stade corrected Bordeaux in the quarter-finals of the Coupe de France and the Little Gironde of February 20 retains him among the players of the match (while debarking his name in “Vologne”).
Read alsoField hockey: made in Gaul?
Tola Vologe’s story with Lyon begins in 1940. An officer during the wartime war and therefore quickly demobilized, he went to town to shelter his mother, of Jewish origin. He joined the hockey team of a local institution, the Olympic University Lyon, of which he then headed the athletics section. He turns out to be an outstanding leader and coach. Under his leadership, his athletes are among the best in France. In addition to his leadership activity, he joined the free sport resistance network. He hides in particular refractory to the Compulsory Labor Service, rescues others from the deportation, which he then exfiles to the maquis of Vercors.
Also an athletics coach, but in a rival club, Tony Bertrand, a great figure in Lyon’s sport, has often told his friend Tola Vologe. “He had a whole character. He was a man brimming with health. He was everywhere, everywhere. He was so full of energy … Nothing stopped him. He spoke and acted without thinking. He didn’t realize that sometimes you had to be quiet, but it had to come out. His temper was like that. “
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Tola Vologe was arrested by the French militia on May 24, 1944. Then incarcerated in the sinister prison of Fort Montluc. He resisted the Germans and fought again and again against the “federates”, as the story goes Paris-Soir you May 27th. “Anatole Vologe, whose sporting activity has often exceeded the limits of the permitted limits – which, moreover, has earned him, lately, a serious sanction from the FFA – would be forced to cease all the functions he had towards and against all decided to keep, despite this sanction. “
France-Soir September 4, 1944 gives the account of the last days of Tola Vologe, by one of his comrades in detention. “On June 4, twenty prisoners from Fort Montluc had been designated to clear the premises of the Gestapo bombed two days before by Allied aircraft. Among these twenty, Vologe … Suddenly, the chore leader calls him and asks two other volunteers to transport wood. A few moments later, a crackling machine gun … Hardly we pay attention. Then we are gathered and we are shown three horribly shredded corpses […] “They wanted to run away and that’s it,” say the sentries. “ One version says that the chief of the chore was a German hockey player who recognized Vologe and decided to make him pay for the French victories against Germany. Version not corroborated by the author of the story that continues in France-Soir: “The explanation is simple. The day before during a chore, two men had been able to escape. For fear of the sanctions which would not fail to befall them, our guards had to plan this scene and say “Five men fled, we shot three.” “ Why was Vologe among the named victims? Because even under the German yoke, he had always refused the spine. The witness continued: “He had never stopped scoffing at his jailers.” He punched an officer who threatened him. Aimed at his revolver, he fired, “But shoot, shoot!” The next day at interrogation another officer handed him a bottle of beer after drinking himself by the throat. Vologe rejected the offer in these terms: “A French officer does not drink after a German officer.” These proud answers had designated him as the first victim. ”
To pay tribute to him, a large athletics meeting called Tola Vologe was organized on October 17, 1944 in Paris. By announcing it, Combat August 28 specifies that it will be “Organized by the French stadium, the Lyon OU and the French CA”. As far as the circumstances and the means of transport allow, our best champions will participate, writes the newspaper which wishes “That athletes fighting in Allied uniforms can also take part, pending the first Allied Games that we hope to see after the Victory.”
Sportsmen during the Second War in Retrosports Maryse Bastié: a very high-profile career and life; The tenniswoman Simonne Mathieu, from sports resilience to active Resistance; Alfred Nakache, “the Auschwitz swimmer; Jacques Cartonnet, pools with muddy waters from collaboration; Jean Borotra, from the Davis Cup to Pétain; Young Perez, the Auschwitz boxer
Dawn August 31, 1944, pays tribute to the man whose newspaper retains only his career in athletics, considered the father of all sports. “How does this Vologe Day which will celebrate September 17th the sacrifice of the LOU coach lead us to think that, of all sports, athletics has the most important martyrology?” We are talking about martyrdom in the etymological sense of the word, in the patriotic sense of the term. […] But we must symbolize by name the fate of these heroes [les sportifs morts au combat, ndlr], he is an athlete whom we subconsciously call. It’s Jean Bouin, El Ghazy, Géo André, Vologe. It’s that running, elementary strength […] keeps in our eyes the marvelous aridity of simple things. Sport without accessories and without machines, without balls and without wheels, athletics makes us, stripped and reduced to their harshest fiber, all the prestige of man. […] We recognize a champion by the way he wins a race and a man by the way he accepts a defeat. Antoine Vologe did not whisper against defeat. He went back to victory. This is how he turned out to be a man. It doesn’t matter that he fell on the way. It is not on the finish line that this human victory is judged but on the start line. ”
Each newspaper goes there from its memory of the martyr. France-Soir from 1is September 1944: “Tola Vologe, if he had a heart of gold, did not hide his feelings and anger sometimes prevailed over caution. His disputes with the “federates” as he said, will remain famous … In Lyon, one day, one of our colleagues, miraculously volatilized since, approached him in these terms: – After protecting the Jews, you protect the negroes today . Allusion to Victor Jacob, retired to Lyon, and to sprinter René Valmy. A formidable kick in the rear chased from the public establishment the bitter character who took revenge last May by publishing, in Paris-Soir, a resounding echo by signaling Vologe’s arrest. ”
It is in the form of a poem in Alexandrine, the quality of which we will not discuss here, that Tonight September 17, 1944 pays tribute to Anatole Vologe:
A accept, oh fighter of sports arenas
N our homage sprung from fleeting hours …
A you who may be going to the lost camp of the Dead,
T itanesque and boiling, extend your efforts
THE open horizons, fight for example
L th mortal collected dreams of the portal of the temple
E You see your ghost again, agitated like a river.
V here over there the track where the worry escapes
THE where you once wore the blue stadium jersey…
L thoughtful athletes will bruise her tomorrow
THE giving the show in the shade of your hand
G uided by a big name who sponsors an event
E t, confident of their means, will forge a Proof
A second Vologe day will take place in 1945, but in Lyon this time. On March 30 of that year, the intransigent ranks Vologe among the five best French sports leaders who disappeared during the war. “In athletics, the death of Tola Vologe, killed by the Germans in Lyon is irreparable. Fiery, fiery, dynamic as hell, knowing how to organize and daring, the enemy of hair cutters in four. Vologe, an athlete also adored by athletes, thought big and would have done tremendous service to the cause of running. ”
Photo Bertrand Fund. Center for History, Resistance and Deportation. City of Lyon
Gilles Dhers
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