{"id":17124,"date":"2024-06-17T10:19:26","date_gmt":"2024-06-17T08:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/artur-london\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T16:41:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T14:41:24","slug":"artur-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/artur-london\/","title":{"rendered":"Artur London"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Born Gerard Elberfeld, 1915\u20131986<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Artur London was born in Ostrava (Czechoslovakia) on February 1, 1915. His father, a Jewish craftsman, was one of the founders of the Communist Party in Ostrava. Unable to afford to continue his education, Artur became a salesman in the textile industry. At age 14, he joined the Communist Youth League, eventually becoming its regional secretary, and spent his first stints in prison for anti-militarist activism and participation in illegal strikes. <\/p>

In January 1934, the Party sent him to Moscow, where he represented the Czechoslovak Communist Youth at the Communist Youth International. It was there that he met Lise Ricol, whom he married in 1935. <\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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During the Spanish Civil War, despite suffering from tuberculosis, London joined the International Brigades as an officer in March 1937. With the help of the French Communist Party, he managed to avoid the French camps where refugees from Spain were interned and returned to the Paris region, where he settled with Lise and their daughter. <\/p>

He holds a leadership position on the Committee for Aid to Spanish Republicans and Veterans of the International Brigades. At the M.O.I., he is responsible for keeping track of activists from Eastern European countries who survived the Spanish Civil War or escaped from camps in southern France. <\/p>

From the very beginning of the Occupation, London joined the Resistance. At the same time, he was active in both the Czechoslovak Communist Party delegation and the M.O.I., where, in August 1940, he became one of the leaders\u2014along with Louis Gronowski and Jacques Kaminski\u2014under the pseudonym G\u00e9rard. <\/p>

In October 1941, at the request of Jacques Duclos (leader of the PCF), he established the Travail Allemand (TA), which specialized in propaganda aimed at German soldiers and in gathering intelligence for the Resistance. The TA published its own newspapers in German. <\/p>

London was arrested on August 12, 1942, by the Paris Special Anti-Terrorist Brigade and brutally interrogated. On July 16, 1943, he was sentenced to ten years of hard labor and a twenty-year ban on residence for communist activities and possession of false documents. <\/p>

Handed over to the Germans, he was deported on February 28, 1944, to Saarbr\u00fccken and then transferred to Mauthausen. Suffering from recurrent tuberculosis, he was admitted to the camp hospital. He became one of the key leaders of the Mauthausen Resistance Committee. <\/p>

London survived. He returned to Czechoslovakia and served as deputy foreign minister in 1949. Arrested in 1951 and tortured, he was accused, along with veterans of the International Brigades in Spain, of being a political opponent. <\/p>

Condemned by the ruling regime during the \u201cpurges\u201d of 1952 and later rehabilitated, he moved to France in 1963 and died in Paris on November 7, 1986.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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References:<\/strong><\/p>

– *Le Maitron*, by Marc Giovaninetti.<\/p>

– Cukier, Simon; Dec\u00e8ze, Dominique; Diamant, David; Grojnowski, Michel, 1987: Revolutionary Jews: \u00c9ditions <\/em>Messidor\/\u00c9ditions sociales<\/p>

– Photo: Le Maitron (DR)<\/p>

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Born Gerard Elberfeld, 1915\u20131986 Artur London was born in Ostrava (Czechoslovakia) on February 1, 1915. His father, a Jewish craftsman, was one of the founders of the Communist Party in Ostrava. Unable to afford to continue his education, Artur became a salesman in the textile industry. At age 14, he joined the Communist Youth League, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17128,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[157],"tags":[],"salle":[182],"source":[],"zone-geo":[],"class_list":["post-17124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biographies","salle-3-3-covert-activities-of-the-jewish-section-of-the-m-o-i"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17129,"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17124\/revisions\/17129"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17124"},{"taxonomy":"salle","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/salle?post=17124"},{"taxonomy":"source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/source?post=17124"},{"taxonomy":"zone-geo","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museemrjmoi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/zone-geo?post=17124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}