Entry to the newspaper in 1970, the journalist, passionate about the arts of the scene and discoverer of talents, died at the age of 96 years.
by Brigitte Salino
The theater will have been his passion. Colette Godard, a great critic of the world, died in Paris, Saturday December 31, at 96 years old. This fall again, she was going to see pieces. She had started a child with her parents. His father was a Jew of Georgian origin, his Jewish mother of Russian origin. In the 1910s, they came from Ukraine in France, because it was the country of freedom and human rights. After Paris, they settled in Rouen (Seine-Maritime) where Samuel Meghberg, the father of Colette and his four brother and sisters, directed a factoring plant.
“They took us to see everything that passed, theater, operetta and opera,” recalled Colette. She had very precise ancient memories, but above all, an obvious certainty: “The theater was normal.”. On the other hand, it took the great age to come for Colette to speak of the Second World War. In 1942, when a roundup was announced in Rouen, part of the family did not believe it. She died in concentration camp. The other part of the family took refuge in free zone. Like many, Colette minimized the role she played, on the side of the resistance: “I wore letters, with a friend.” One day, both were taken, and separated. Colette was taken to the office of the chief of the Kommandantur, in Agen. “I was alone with him, he looked at my passport and said to me: What do you do in France with a foreign name?” Then this German officer, who obviously knew that Colette was Jewish, came out from his office. Colette left the Kommandantur, but she never knew what her friend had become, probably shot. “Since then, I swallow my guilt,” she admitted.
Before, the family has passed a time in Marseille where Colette discovered, in the hotel where her family lived, the interlope world of transvestites – a love that never left it. Very young, she made her start in the theater with her brother, Jean Serge, – one of the future founders of Europe 1 – who reopens the northern puffs, in Paris, under the name of the theater of the Carrefours, in 1945 and created The unnecessary mouths, of Simone de Beauvoir.
lack of prejudices, lively look, taste for discovery
Very quickly, Colette enters the radio, where she became a voice of French broadcasting, then of France Culture, with these qualities of which she will never depart: absence of prejudices, lively look, taste for discovery. Colette did not like anything as much as tracking the novelty, finding the unusual and clear its meaning. She used it tirelessly, with an energy that leaves speechless.
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