Missak Manouchian

   Missak Manouchian was born on September 1, 1906, in Armenia (then part of the Ottoman Empire), into a peasant family. His family was massacred by the Turks when he was nine years old. Taken in by the Armenian community, he and his brother, Karapet, were placed in an orphanage in Lebanon under French mandate. There, he was trained as a carpenter. In 1925, he arrived in Marseille with Karapet and then decided to move to Paris, where he was hired as a lathe operator at Citroën.

   He was interested in literature, wrote poems, and took classes at the Sorbonne as an auditor. Together with an Armenian friend, he founded two journals, *Tchank* (The Effort) and then *Machagouyt* (Culture), in which they published articles on French and Armenian literature.

   He joined the French Communist Party as well as the HOC (Armenian Relief Committee) and became involved with the Armenian group affiliated with the M.O.I. In 1935, he took over as editor of the newspaper *Zangou*, published under the auspices of the HOC. It was under these circumstances that he met Mélinée Assadourian, whom he married in February 1936. After the HOC was dissolved in 1937, he worked to establish the Franco-Armenian People’s Union. He was arrested following the banning of the PCF in September 1939.

   He enlisted as a volunteer and was stationed in Morbihan. After the defeat, he was required to remain in the Sarthe region under the control of the authorities, but managed to escape in early 1941. Upon his return to Paris, he was arrested again in June 1941 and interned at the Royallieu camp in Compiègne. As the political leader of the Armenian section within the M.O.I., he joined the first FTP-M.O.I. detachment in February 1943 under the pseudonym Georges. In July 1943, he replaced Alik Neuer—who had been arrested—as technical leader of the Paris FTP-M.O.I. In August 1943, he succeeded Boris Holban as military commander of the Paris FTP-M.O.I. In particular, on September 28, 1943, he oversaw the assassination attempt against Julius Ritter, an SS general and Fritz Sauckel’s deputy for France, who was in charge of the STO.

   As early as September 1943, Missak Manouchian was spotted by Special Brigade 2, and his secret hideout was identified. On November 16, 1943, while on his way to meet with Joseph Epstein, the leader of the French Francs-Tireurs and Partisans (FTP), he was arrested, along with Epstein, at the Évry Petit-Bourg train station. After being tortured, Manouchian was handed over to the German authorities along with twenty-two of his FTP-M.O.I. comrades. On February 19, 1944, all twenty-three defendants were sentenced to death in a closed-door trial before a German court-martial in Paris. They were executed by firing squad at Mont-Valérien on February 21, 1944.

   A “Red Poster,” intended to instill fear, displays the photos of 10 of these Resistance fighters (7 Jews immigrants, 1 Spaniard, 1 Italian, 1 Armenian—Manouchian), from several FTP-M.O.I. detachments. Posted by the occupying forces on walls throughout France’s major cities, the poster actually sparked sympathy among the population for the condemned members of the “Manouchian group.”