At dawn on February 14, 1944, a column of German trucks, coming from Lyon, stopped along the road, at a place called “Croix Sicard” on snowy ground in bitter cold.
It was on foot that a detachment traveled the 400 meters to the place where an unthinkable drama was about to take place. No means of communication allowed anyone to give the alert.

At the edge of the wood, a house was going to be the scene of unbearable barbarism. Quickly surrounded by the soldiers, it was literally sprinkled with offensive and incendiary grenades, thrown through the openings, surprising in their sleep seven young people who were sleeping, as one can sleep at seven o'clock in the morning when one is twenty years old. No chance was left for them to extricate themselves from the trap into which they had fallen. One of them attempted the impossible exit, but the SS bullets pinned him in the garden, only sparing him the sad fate that was reserved for his comrades, being burned. It was completed at the end of the morning, after hours of agony.

At daybreak, everything was over, only the smoking ruins hinted at the scene that had just taken place. The mutilated bodies of the seven young people, who were part of an FTPF group, were gathered in a final farewell. They rest in a common grave, in the village cemetery, after a very moving ceremony followed by a silent crowd...

The location of the house near the woods should allow them to faint easily at the slightest warning. This house was owned by the parents of one of them. Unfortunately, these young people, probably not suspicious enough, sometimes rubbed shoulders with a sad individual who, when he was sufficiently freed from their activities, went to denounce them to the SS for a small sum of money. The same day, he had his brother deported, as well as the peasant from whom the young people were getting their supplies. Interned in the camps, they never returned.

Several other people were tracked down that day, but the information of the news, luck or fate meant that they were not in the houses visited by the SS. The mayor himself owed his salvation only to his state of health; he was, in fact, bedridden that day.

The traitor did not profit for long from his crime, nor from his bounty. Arrested, tried, condemned, he was quickly executed in Lyon.

In order not to forget this episode, to remember the circumstances that preceded it, a stele was erected on the very site of the house.
Today's youth, walkers, who come to Salagnon, you will discover on this stele the names of these martyrs.

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