The news put into perspective every Saturday, thanks to the historian Fabrice d’Almeida.
Missak Manouchian and his wife Melinée, who served as a liaison officer, are two great resistance fighters. Manouchian is the leader of a network stemming from the Communist Party: the Francs-tireurs et partisans Main-d’oeuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI). He led three groups of fighters. It was the military branch of the PCF which decided to carry out attacks against the occupier, more than a hundred in 1943. One of his lieutenants, Raymond Rajman with a group of three men, arrived on September 28, 1943 to kill the head of forced labor in France, General Julius Ritter. The Germans are beginning to be afraid.
For the Vichy police, it is becoming urgent to dismantle this group. The special brigades of the police prefecture in charge of the fight against communism carry out spinning. In July, they arrest some members of the network and thanks to brutal interrogations, they begin to have an idea of the number of resisters. In September, Manouchian is identified and spotted. But we follow him to identify all his subordinates. On November 16, 1943, he was arrested when he had an appointment with Joseph Epstein, another FTP-MOI official, known as Colonel Gilles.
In all more than sixty members of the FTP are trapped over the months. Soon the French transmitted Manouchian and several of his men to the Germans. The German authorities receive Manouchian with 23 other members of the FTP. They are tried by a military court in a show trial and all, including a woman, Olga Bancic, are sentenced to death.
“I die as a regular soldier of the French Army”
The Germans make a propaganda film denouncing these “terrorists”. They also print a poster that has become famous, the Red Poster, with the portraits of ten of the members of the group, to give the impression that they are foreigners, members of an army of criminals who commit attacks, not soldiers, contrary to what Manouchian thought who wrote in his last letter to his wife Mélinée: “JI die as a regular soldier of the French Army of Liberation.”
On February 21, 1944, after going to confession and taking communion with fellow atheists, Manouchian was shot in the clearing of Fort Suresnes, in Mont-Valérien. You have to imagine the scene: 40 guns turned against five men. The shots, then the final blow given by the officer commanding the platoon. His body is buried in the cemetery of Ivry with other resistance fighters. It is there that, as soon as the war ended and France was liberated, and his PCF companions came to pay homage to him.
>>> Resistance fighters Mélinée and Missak Manouchian will enter the Pantheon
Missak and Mélinée embody a forgotten facet of the fighters of the Second World War. They are native foreigners, neither Gaullists nor Socialists, but Communists. This man who had chosen to defend his adopted country, France, signs his last letter to his wife Mélinée with his French name Michel, not Missak, his Armenian first name. He leaves poems that we can still read today, he who worked alongside the working class.