Far from the grand national narratives, Thiérache experienced the Occupation at the level of the village: surveillance, shortages, quiet solidarity, and local acts of resistance. This space brings together the objects and documents that tell that reality, as it played out around Momignies.
In Momignies, the French border is never far away — and that changes everything. Checkpoints, curfews, requisitions: the occupier keeps a close watch on the region precisely because it offers a way out. In the farms and villages, this proximity becomes a risk shared by everyone: every act of solidarity, every silence kept, exposes an entire family to denunciation or reprisals.
As elsewhere in occupied Belgium, local residents organised themselves: passing on information, sheltering a wanted person for a night, printing and distributing a clandestine newsletter. Nothing spectacular, on the face of it — but each of these acts required absolute trust between neighbours, and a risk that few official accounts have bothered to preserve.