Pensionnaires de l’hôtel du Parc (Residents of the Hôtel du Parc)
"The original play Goscie Hotelu Du Parc was written by Karol Obidniak and Jozef Wedrychowski in 1956. Based on their memories, the authors, who were both students at the school, set out to evoke the resistance network created through the school and to pay tribute to the students, teachers and administrative staff who died during the fighting in the Vercors and the period that followed.
Pensionnaires de l’hôtel du Parc (Residents of the Hôtel du Parc)
Publications • 2009
In the afterword to the 1983 edition, the authors state: ""Some of the people featured in this work are sadly no longer alive. The play is about them, the students and teachers of the Polish high school. It reminds us how, while preparing to live in peace, they fought in the French Resistance for a better future, and how they left us full of hope. Many of them fell in the great battle fought against the Germans on the Vercors plateau. May this play be a modest – but moving – tribute to those who, so young, left us forever.”
Les Pensionnaires de l'Hôtel du Parc is not a historical account. There are many approximations, the most obvious concerns the presence of the headmaster, Mr Godlewski: the play is supposed to take place in June or July 1944, but Godlewski had already been deported to Mauthausen several months earlier. Furthermore, its anti-clerical tone has more to do with the atmosphere of 1950s Soviet Poland than with the real patriotic and religious fervour of the students.
However, Tadeusz Lepkowski, also a former student, who went on to become one of his country's great historians, wrote about the play in the following terms in a book he devoted to the Polish high school: ""It doesn't matter how many inaccuracies there are in the play, so long as the authors manage to accurately capture the atmosphere and values of the school. And while their chronology is sometimes fanciful, the main events are very real, such as the participation of students and teachers in resistance networks and the raid on an arms depot at the Villard gendarmerie.
Les Pensionnaires de l'Hôtel du Parc was performed several times in Poland between 1975 and 1983, and in Villard-de-Lans, Isère and the Rhône 12 times in 2009 and 2010.
Published by the association - 68 pages, 6 photos - Sold by the association and at the Maison du Patrimoine in Villard-de-Lans. Also available to download from this website - €10 plus postage.