EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALSeptember
4, 1999
St. Etienne de Crossey
Grenoble
In 1968 Grenoble hosted the winter Olympics. At the time there was a telerifique,
or cablecar that had been taking visitors up to the 400 metre, 16th century Fort
de la Bastille since 1914. In 1976 the city redesigned the telerifique into the
one-of-a-kind five-ball gondola we see today. When it goes up and down the mountain it
casts a shadow like five peas in a row on the Isere riverside rowhouses below.
The University of Grenoble is the centre of French chemical, electronic and nuclear
research. From the Bastille we can see a cyclotron – the size of a racetrack – a
contained course for accelerating and colliding particles.
An Internet café at the city centre is tucked behind a series of pedestrian ways and a
chic bar. It’s a gutted stone building stacked with computers – Rich convinces
the owners to let him connect to their network with the laptop – an activity often
shunned by proprietors out of fear of hacking and viruses.
The Musee de la Resistance houses three storeys of documentation relating to the
French Resistance during World War II. Grenoble earned the nickname "Little
Russia" by the German army, so afraid were they to tackle the Alps and fight the
efficiently organized underground of nationalists who were sabotaging, hiding arms,
forging papers and protecting Jews in the Vercors and Chartreuse up until the Liberation.
Still, thousands of resisters were arrested and sent to concentration camps in Poland and
Germany along with foreign Jews and dissident Italians and Germans who had flocked to the
unoccupied, "free" Republic France under the Vichy government. The museum
includes items eventually brought back from the camps by a few surviving, liberated
prisoners: a tin cup stamped Buchenwald, a striped hat stained with dandelion sap,
a felt triangle identity badge, a wooden chess piece.
