There was no official demonstration of protest except for a message of sympathy of the town council after having « learned with a painful emotion the news from the evacuation from the quaniers from the Old man-Port ordered without his knowledge by the German authorities ».
It organized the helps, blaming those which benefitted from this great misery, and courageously denounced everywhere publicly the crime, wrote to the prefect, to the Pétain Marshal.
A great voice however rose, that of the Abbot Cayol, the priest of St-Laurent. 80 years old, it refused to leave its church and throughout all operations the knell sounded unrelentingly while the most enthusiastic parish of Marseilles died. Remained only, it celebrated tous.les.jours the mass for all its parishioners, the " Sanjanenques ".
One of its letters known as: « as it was necessary nevertheless to find terrorists; gangsters, gangsters, in our peaceful and hard population, one chooses without discrimination of young people, good fathers of family who at the present time are still held, interned like undesirable; but martyrs of the distress, the incurie and the satisfying of the municipal administration ».
