The Berjou museum welcomed 2,500 people this summer 2020. It has just grown, but its managers have other projects as well.
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Great moment for the municipality of Berjou (Orne), Saturday September 12, 2020. The expansion of the small museum. A site that has ambitions for the future!
It’s not just the Battle of Chambois
Romain Bon is the creator of the museum. Saturday, he inaugurated, in the presence of elected officials, the expansion of the site. He returned to the history of this museum. He recounted its genesis.
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It’s a somewhat banal story with an encounter with elderly people from Berjou. We didn’t have any military collection, and even we never really cared about it. However, elderly people in the town have mentioned the Battle of Berjou.
At the start, we laughed at them a bit, saying that, for us, the battle was in Chambois. They told us that there had been one in Chambois, but also one in Berjou.
Suddenly, “we started to collect objects with them. We started with German helmets in the town. We didn’t really know what to do with it. “
The click of the museum came later, after a small exhibition on a Sunday afternoon at the town hall.
So we bought a building with our own funds. It was a building that had been occupied by the Germans, which was bombed by the British. The elders told us that the Germans slept there for a week.
Objects with known history
From the outset, the decision was made not to go and get supplies from stock exchanges, second-hand goods …
“Anything that goes into this museum has to have a story and you have to know how people got it. We always take the example of our German model who, for 9 years, still has not had boots. We hide it. Maybe one day he will have boots. It would be so easy to go on the Internet tonight and buy her some boots. We don’t want it: we want the boots to come to us like that. “
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A museum that started from nothing. “But, very quickly, we found ourselves overwhelmed by the material that people kept, and by their stories. Besides that, we realized that there was also a historical side. “
An expansion in spring
“This winter, we decided to expand. Except we didn’t have the funds. So, made a little jackpot online. In addition, we asked all the local businesses, not to do the work for us, but to provide us with the equipment so that we could do the work, on a voluntary basis. All the companies played along. We were even surprised by that. “
But this expansion is only a step, for Romain Bon.
This summer, we were given more material and all the stories that go with it. Local historians like Christophe Prim or Stéphane Jonot from the Montormel memorial, explained to us the historical part of this battle. We must therefore focus our work on this history.
In addition to the audio recordings of the elders of the town, an English family provided us with videos that they found in the archives in England with Cerisy-Belle-Etoile, Tinchebray, Flers, Saint-Denis-de-Méré, Berjou, Saint- Pierre-la-Vella …
We can’t use them in the museum, because we don’t have the space.
The next expansion will be dedicated to it. “We would also like to create a job there.” From June to September, the museum made 2,500 entries just by opening from 2pm to 6pm on Saturdays. And 500 on August 15 alone!
Read also: In Berjou, discover the small museum of the liberation of August 1944
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