Today, let’s remember Nathalie Croteau.
Nathalie and 13 other women died during the École Polytechnique Massacre on this date, December 6, 1989.
Nathalie was only 23 years old when she died, a few months from graduating as a mechanical engineering student. Media reports identified her as a good friend to others and an science enthusiast. She might have been an industry leader in Quebec. We’ll never know.
Too often, stories talk about the gunman, giving him a notoriety he doesn’t deserve. I’d much rather commemorate Nathalie and her contribution. She’s the one who deserves to be famous and remembered.
Or, if we must say a man’s name today, why not weep for then engineering student, Sarto Blais? Sarto was at the Polytechnique that fateful day, but was unable to stop the shooter. The graduate killed himself in remorse in August 1990. His parents killed themselves ten months after their only son’s suicide. He and his parents deserve to be remembered too. We need to combat the mental illness that stems from trauma like the massacre.
Montreal, Quebec and Canada lost too many wonderful people 30 years ago today. On this, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, let’s remember them.
Remembering the women
In addition to Nathalie Croteau and Sarto Blais, we also remember:
- Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
- Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
- Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
- Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
- Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
- Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
- Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
Remember Geneviève Bergeron
Geneviève Bergeron was a twenty-one year old second-year scholarship student in mechanical engineering that year. She sang in a choir, played the clarinet and loved swimming, gymnastics and playing basketball. Then Mayor Jean Doré knew her as the eldest daughter of Thérèse Daviau, who then served as city councilor for the Montreal Citizens’ Movement. As a teenager, Bergeron went door-to-door in 1984 to help Doré win his first election. She also babysat Doré’s 3-year-old daughter.
Her sister spoke to CBC radio reporter Laura Marchand for an article published today.
She was my hero,” Bergeron said, smiling. “I remember her as a sunshine. That’s what we used to call her: our Sunshine.”
Catherine had an article in Le Devoir in 2005 that you can still read today.
Elaine Audet, whose daughter attended FACE with Geneviève also wrote a letter about her.
Remember Hélène Colgan
Hélène wasa 23-year-old mechanical engineering student on the day she died.
Finding information about what she believed in is difficult. All I could find is references to three job offers she was considering at the time, including one near Toronto, and her desire to do a masters degree. There’s also a brief statement about her energy from her father Clarence in a book about the events.
That’s all the more reason to miss her now. Who knows what she might have accomplished had she lived.
Her brother Claude Colgan, spoke about her in French on a video.
Remember Barbara-Maria Klucznik-Widajewicz.
The 31-year-old nursing student got shot enjoying a cheap meal with her husband in the cafeteria. Newspapers ran a photo of her collapsed in her chair for days afterwards.
She and her husband had emigrated to Canada from Poland two years earlier looking for a safer life. A failed referendum left little room for solidarity activists like them.
Klucznik-Widajewicz spoke five languages and held degrees in engineering and economics when she arrived. She worked as a nanny and her husband worked overnight in a nursing home before they had enough to go back to school.
While he studied to be a psychiatrist, she studied nursing.
The Berlin wall came down a month before she died. The cold war ended. Europe was safe again. Would they go home?
We’ll never know where their dreams might have led. They died with her on December 6, 1989.
Her husband Witold Widajewicz spoke of his shock examining her body to a Gazette newspaper reporter a year after her death.
I opened the zipper and I found a hole in the left breast, the breast that I had kissed that day — one hole that finished everything, the American dream in this country,” said Widajewicz, then 30 years old.
We all empathized with his plight. Many of us remembered the photo of her slumped in her chair. The multiple bodies on stretchers rolled out of the school. All of it so horrific.
Poland repatriated Barbara’s body after she died. Her husband and all of Canada faced an enormous loss.
Women Engineer Success
If you prefer to commemorate today looking at the future instead of the past, join Mary Wells in celebrating 30 successful women in the engineering field who graduated within three years of that time.
Wells graduated from McGill as an engineer two years prior to the Massacre.
Her tribute page “30 years later” gives us just a small sense of what Canada lost when so many women engineer students–and one nursing student and trained engineer–died.