Their number is incalculable, as is their value. Thousands of foreign resistance fighters, including Polish Jews, Armenian communists and Spanish Republicans, risked their lives to liberate France from Nazi Germany, which will honor them eighty years later.
On February 21, the remains of the most famous of these resistance fighters, the Armenian communist Missak Manouchian, will enter the French temple of the “Immortals,” the Pantheon of Paris, on behalf of his comrades in arms.
“The ‘pantheonization’ of Missak Manouchian is based on a symbol because it has remained in the memory of the French people for many reasons,” explains Renée Poznanski, curator of the exhibition “Foreigners in Resistance in France,” which houses the memorial to the Shoah in Paris.
The expert lists them: poet, survivor of the massacres of Armenians in 1915 in what is now Turkey – which are considered genocide in around 30 countries -, most important resistance fighter in Paris, executed by the Germans in 1944 at the age of 37…
However, it was the so-called “Affiche rouge”, a red poster of Nazi propaganda against his group, that immortalized his face and those of nine of his companions, including the “Red Spaniard” Alfonso and the “Hungarian Jew” Elek, the “Italian Communist” Fontanot and the “Polish Jew” Rayman. AFP