Missak Manouchian

Portrait kept in the German Federal Archives and reproduced on the so-called Affiche rouge (Red Poster).

Missak Manouchian (also spelled Manoushian) (Armenian: Միսաք Մանուշյան) (1 September 1906 - 21 February 1944) was a French poet of Armenian birth, a militant communist in the MOI (Main-d'œuvre immigrée or Immigrant Workforce Movement), and military commissioner of the FTP-MOI (Partisan irregulars of the MOI) in the Paris region. He was 37 years old when executed by the Germans for his Résistance work.

Although Manouchian became well known for his leadership in the French Resistance, he was, above all, an intellectual and a talented poet.

Early life

Missak Manouchian was born on 1 September 1906 at Adıyaman in the Ottoman Empire into a peasant family of Armenian ethnicity. The town was near the Syrian border. Manouchian's father died during the Armenian genocide of 1915, and his mother died soon afterward.

Missak and his brother, Karabet, now orphaned, joined the stream of Armenian refugees' heading south into the French protectorate of Syria. The brothers were accepted at an orphanage, where they learned the French language, and acquired carpentry and other manual skills. They remained until they were able to secure passage to Marseilles, where they landed in 1925, when Manouchian was 19. Eventually, they moved to Paris, where Missak took a job as a lathe operator at a Citroën plant and joined the General Confederation of Labour (in French: Confédération Générale du Travail or CGT). This national association of trade unions was the first of the five major French confederations.

His brother Karabet died in 1927 of unknown causes. In the early 1930s when the world-wide economic crisis of the Great Depression set in, Missak Manouchian lost his job. Disaffected with capitalism, he began earning a meager living by posing as a model for sculptors. Manouchian also wrote poetry and, with his Armenian friend by the surname of Semmes, he founded two literary magazines, Tchank (Effort) and Machagouyt (Culture). They published articles on French literature and Armenian culture. The two young men translated the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud into Armenian, making many of these works available in Armenian for the first time. Both Manouchian and Semmes enrolled at the Sorbonne to audit courses in literature, philosophy, economics, and history.

In 1934, Manouchian joined the Communist Party. The following year, he was elected secretary of the Relief Committee for Armenia (HOC), an organization associated with the MOI (Immigrant Workforce Movement). He became a full-time militant. At a meeting of the MOI in 1935, he met a woman named Mélinée Assadourian, who became his companion (and, later, his wife). Also in 1935, Manouchian assumed responsibility for the Armenian-language weekly newspaper, Zangou, named for an Armenian river.

The Resistance

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Manouchian as a foreigner was evacuated from Paris. He found work in the Rouen area, again as a lathe-operator. After the defeat of June 1940, he returned to Paris to find that his militant activities had become illegal. (French authorities had banned the Communist Party as early as September 1939.) On 22 June 1941, when the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis began, Manouchian was arrested by the occupying Germans in an anti-Communist round-up in Paris. Interned in a prison camp at Compiègne, he was released after a few weeks without being charged.^{[citation needed]}

Manouchian became the political chief of the Armenian section of the underground MOI, but little is known about his activities until 1943. In February of that year, Manouchian transferred to the FTP-MOI, a group of gunmen and saboteurs attached to the MOI in Paris; the FTP was an armed faction of the MOI that had been formed in April 1942 under the leadership of the Jewish Bessarabian, Boris Holban. The first detachment to which he was assigned included mostly Jewish Romanians and Hungarians, and only a few Armenians.^{[citation needed]}

On 17 March 1943, Manouchian at age 36 participated in his first armed action, in Levallois-Perret. His lack of discipline earned him a reprimand, and he was suspended from further operations. In July 1943, he became technical commissioner of the FTP-MOI in Paris; in August, he became the military commissioner, replacing Boris Holban, who had been dismissed for insubordination. Joseph Epstein, head of another group of FTP-MOI, became the head of all of the partisan guerrilla fighters in the Paris region. Manouchian assumed command of three detachments, totaling about 50 fighters. The Manouchian group is credited with the assassination (by the partisans, Marcel Rayman, Léo Kneller, and Celestino Alfonso) on 28 September 1943, of General Julius Ritter, the assistant in France to Fritz Sauckel, responsible for the mobilization and deportation of labor under the German STO (the Obligatory Work Service) in Nazi-occupied Europe. The groups under Manouchian carried out almost thirty successful attacks on German interests from August to November 1943.^{[citation needed]}

In March and July 1943, the Special Brigade No. 2 of General Intelligence made two sweeps, looking for troublemakers. (The Special Brigades were a collaborationist French police force specializing in tracking down "internal enemies": members of the French Resistance, dissidents, escaped prisoners, Jews, and those evading the STO.) The Special Brigades undertook a large operation based on tailing suspected activists, an effort which eventually led to the complete dismantling of the FTP-MOI of Paris in mid-November. They arrested a total of 68 persons, including Manouchian and Epstein. On the morning of 16 November 1943, Manouchian was arrested in his headquarters at Evry-Petit Bourg. His companion, Mélinée, managed to escape the police.^{[citation needed]}

Missak Manouchian, tortured, and 22 of his comrades were handed over to the Germans' Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP) and all 23 were exploited in a show trial for propaganda purposes before execution. Manouchian and 21 of his comrades were shot at Fort Mont-Valérien, near Paris, on 21 February 1944. Only Olga Bancic, the twenty-third member of Manouhian's inner circle, was executed elsewhere; she was beheaded in the prison at Stuttgart on 10 May 1944.^{[citation needed]}

The members of the group were:

• Celestino Alfonso — Spaniard
• Olga Bancic — Romanian
• József Boczov — Jewish Hungarian^[1]
• Georges Cloarec — French
• Rino Della Negra— Italian
• Támas Elek — Jewish Hungarian^[1]
• Maurice Fingercwajg — Polish
• Spartaco Fontano — Italian
• Imre Békés Glasz — Jewish Hungarian^[1]
• Jonas Geduldig — Polish
• Léon Goldberg — Polish
• Szlama Grzywacz — Polish
• Stanislas Kubacki — Polish
• Arpen Lavitian — Armenian
• Cesare Luccarini — Italian
• Missak Manouchian — Armenian
• Marcel Rayman — Polish
• Roger Rouxel — French
• Antonio Salvadori — Italian
• Willy Szapiro — Polish
• Amadeo Usseglio— Italian
• Wolf Wajsbrot — Polish
• Robert Witchitz — French

The last letter

My dear Melinée, my beloved little orphan,

In a few hours I will no longer be of this world. We are going to be executed today at 3:00. This is happening to me like an accident in my life; I don’t believe it, but I nevertheless know that I will never see you again.

What can I write you? Everything inside me is confused, yet clear at the same time.

I joined the Army of Liberation as a volunteer, and I die within inches of victory and the final goal. I wish for happiness for all those who will survive and taste the sweetness of the freedom and peace of tomorrow. I'm sure that the French people, and all those who fight for freedom, will know how to honor our memory with dignity. At the moment of death, I proclaim that I have no hatred for the German people, or for anyone at all; everyone will receive what he is due, as punishment and as reward. The German people, and all other people, will live in peace and brotherhood after the war, which will not last much longer. Happiness for all ... I have one profound regret, and that’s of not having made you happy; I would so much have liked to have a child with you, as you always wished. So I'd absolutely like you to marry after the war, and, for my happiness, to have a child and, to fulfill my last wish, marry someone who will make you happy. All my goods and all my affairs, I leave them to you and to my nephews. After the war you can request your right to a war pension as my wife, for I die as a regular soldier in the French army of liberation.

With the help of friends who'd like to honor me, you should publish my poems and writings that are worth being read. If possible, you should take my memory to my parents in Armenia. I will soon die with 23 of my comrades, with the courage and the serenity of a man with a peaceful conscience; for, personally, I've done no one ill, and if I have, it was without hatred. Today is sunny. It’s in looking at the sun and the beauties of nature that I loved so much that I will say farewell to life and to all of you, my beloved wife, and my beloved friends. I forgive all those who did me evil, or who wanted to do so, with the exception of he who betrayed us to redeem his skin, and those who sold us out. I ardently kiss you, as well as your sister and all those who know me, near and far; I hold you all against my heart. Farewell. Your friend, your comrade, your husband,

Manouchian Michel

P.S. I have 15,000 francs in the valise on the rue de Plaisance. If you can get it, pay off all my debts and give the rest to Armenia. MM

The original document "the last letter by Manouchian" is currently stored in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

The red poster

Main article: Red Poster

In the wake of the executions, the Germans printed 15,000 propaganda posters, the famous red posters, that bore photos of ten of the dead, each in its own black medallion. In the center of the poster, Manouchian appeared, with this inscription: "Armenian gang leader, 56 bombings, 150 dead, 600 wounded." The objective of the poster was to convince ordinary French citizens that the members of MOI (and the Resistance in general) were nothing but murderous foreigners and a danger to law-abiding, cooperative, citizens. But, the red posters, pasted on the walls all over Paris, became emblems of martyrdom by freedom fighters, and popular support for the Resistance grew.

Legacy

• In 1955, on the occasion of the dedication of a street in the 20th arrondissement of Paris named for the Mamouchian group, Louis Aragon wrote a poem, "Strophes pour se souvenir", loosely inspired by the last letter that Missak Manouchian wrote to his wife Mélinée. In 1959 Léo Ferré set the poem to music and recorded it under the title "L'Affiche rouge". The last stanza of Aragon's poem is:

They were twenty-three when the rifles blossomed

Twenty-three who gave their hearts before their time

Twenty-three foreigners but still our brothers

Twenty-three who loved life to death

Twenty-three who cried out “France!” as they fell.

• The mayor of Evry named a park along the Seine a few hundred yards from Evry station for Missak Manouchian. He established a memorial at the place of his arrest.

• A commemorative plaque was installed on 21 February 2009 by the mayor of the city of Paris at 11 rue de Plaisance, in the 14th arrondissement in the presence of a number of former Resistance fighters. The old hotel at this address was the last home shared by Mélinée (born Assadourian) and Missak Manouchian.

• In 1985, Mélinée Manouchian, who had managed to elude Nazi capture during the war, launched a public debate by stating that comrades of the victims had done nothing to prevent their capture and execution.

• In the 1980s and 1990s, there has been controversy generated by documentaries arguing for revision to wartime accounts.

Photographs taken secretly by a German officer were made public by Serge Klarsfeld in December 2009.

See also

• French Communist Party
• French Resistance
• Affiche Rouge (Red Poster)
• The Army of Crime, a film by Robert Guédiguian (2009)

	Paris portal
	World War II portal
	Communism portal
	Literature portal
	Poetry portal

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Art proscrit, Exposition a Budapest du 17 avril au 15 aout 2010, Mardi Hongrois Blog, accessed 30 Aug 2010

Further reading

• Stéphane Courtois, "Missak Manouchian", in Biographical Dictionary of the French labor movement, Workers Publishing.
• Stéphane Courtois, Denis Peschanski, Adam Rayski, Blood from abroad - Immigrants of the MOI in the Resistance, Paris: Fayard, 1989.
• Didier Daeninckx, Missak, Perrin, 2009.
• Philippe Ganier-Raymond, The Red Poster, Fayard, 1975
• Gaston Laroche, They were called foreigners, the French gathered Publishers, 1965.
• Mélinée Manouchian, Manouchian, The French Publishers meeting, Paris, 1954; reprint 1974.
• Benoit Rayski, The Red Poster, Denoel Publishing, Paris 2009.
• A. Tchakarian, Les Francs-shooters of the Red Poster, Paris, 1986.
• Serge Venturini , "Missak Manouchian", in Shards: of a poetics of becoming transhuman, 2003-2008 (Book III), collection Poets of the five continents, Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 2009, (book dedicated to Missak Manouchian) (ISBN 978-2-296-09603-5), pp. 104–116.

External links

• "Unveiling of the plaque in memory of Manouchian on the rue Plaisance", [archive], mairie du 14^e arrondissement de Paris, October 22, 2008.
• Bastien Hugues, "Les derniers instants du groupe Manouchian" (The last moments of the group Manouchian), Le Figaro, [archive], 11 Dec 2009 - three recently released photos of the execution, taken by a Wehrmacht officer.

Persondata
Name	Manouchian, Missak
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1906
Place of birth
Date of death	1944
Place of death