Jenta/Jeanne List, born in 1910 in Poland, in Maklinia Gorna in the northeastern part of the country, about six kilometers from Treblinka, came from a family of farmers and small business owners.
She arrived in France in 1930 to study medicine, but due to a lack of funds, she had to give up her studies. She then became a furrier.
In 1932, she married Léon Pakin, a communist activist. The couple had one son.
Living in Paris’s 10th arrondissement, she joined the French Communist Party and was an active member of progressive Jewish activist networks during the interwar period.
In the early 1940s, she sheltered and helped Léon Pakin after his escape following the defeat of the Republican army in Spain during a transfer from the Gurs camp to Germany. The two went into hiding when the Resistance networks were threatened.
Following the waves of arrests in March and June–July 1941, Jeanne List became a liaison for her brother-in-law Louis Gronowski, the national director of the M.O.I.
His sister, known by the pen name Lily Berger, is also an intellectual and activist.
Léon Pakin, a former volunteer with the International Brigades in Spain who later led a detachment of the FTP-MOI, was arrested by French police on June 29, 1942, before being handed over to the German authorities and executed by firing squad at Mont-Valérien on July 27, 1942.
After the Liberation, Louis Grojnowski encouraged Jeanne List-Pakin to return to Poland with her son. There, she worked for the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
Driven out by anti-Semitism, she finally returned to France in 1956 and was no longer a member of the Communist Party.
She died in Montpellier in 1999.
References:
-Maitron Online: entry by Claude Pennetier
-Wieworka, Annette (1986). They Were Jews, Resistance Fighters, Communists: Éditions Perrin.
