5 replies to this topic

[Yervant1]

 

President Hollande attends event dedicated to the 70th anniversary of execution of Missak Manouchian

19:25 21.02.2014

0

 

• 
• 

• Previous
• Next

 

A commemoration ceremony dedicated to the 70th anniversary of execution of Missak Manouchian and his commanders by Nazis was held in Fort Mont-Valérien fortress in one of the suburbs of Paris.

French President Francois Hollande laid a wreath at the memorial and made a speech. Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian laid a wreath on behalf of the Republic of Armenia. The letter Missak Manouchian wrote to his wife Melinee was read out at the event:

Speaking about Manouchian, President Hollande said: “He was one of those survivors of the Armenian Genocide, who settled in France and joined its struggle for liberation. Manouchian was not the only Armenian to sacrifice his life for the freedom of the country.”

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.”

Attending the ceremony were members of the French Government, the Senate and the National Assembly, politicians and public figures, Charles Aznavour, representatives of the Armenian organizations of France.

Edited by Yervant1, 22 February 2014 - 08:55 AM.

[Yervant1]

Boston Globe

Aug 12 2018

 

 

Arsène Tchakarian, World War II resistance fighter in France, dies at 101

 

By Phil Davison Washington Post  August 11, 2018

Arsène Tchakarian, the last surviving member of the Armenian-led Manouchian network, which fought alongside the French resistance against the Nazi occupiers during World War II, died Aug. 4 at a hospital in Villejuif, south of Paris. He was 101.

Mr. Tchakarian, an ethnic Armenian born in Turkey during the Ottoman Empire, later received France’s highest award, as a commander of the Legion of Honor. His family announced the death but did not specify the cause.

President Emmanuel Macron of France commemorated Mr. Tchakarian on Twitter as ‘‘a hero of the resistance and tireless witness whose voice resonated strongly to the very end.’’

The Manouchian resistance network, named after Mr. Tchakarian’s fellow Armenian Missak Manouchian, a poet and resistance leader, was made up of immigrants from many nations that had been affected by Hitler’s expansionism — Italians, Greeks, Romanians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Spaniards, Poles, even young German Jews who had fled to what was then a free France.

‘‘There was such a friendship between us, between all these people coming from everywhere, Jews, Spanish, Italians, Germans, Armenians and French of course,’’ Mr. Tchakarian said in a 2002 speech to pupils at a junior high school near his home in Vitry-sur-Seine, France. ‘‘A brotherly friendship which surpassed all that you can imagine.’’

 

Throughout World War II, the Manouchian network linked up with the local French resistance to carry out a guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupiers, including broad-daylight assassinations and sabotage of power lines and munitions trains.

Mr. Tchakarian, code-named Charles, started out secretly distributing anti-Nazi tracts in Paris. After meeting Manouchian, he recalled that his fellow Armenian told him: ‘‘Enough of tracts, we are now being asked to fight with arms.’’

Mr. Tchakarian’s first assignment was to throw a grenade among a group of Nazi soldiers. 

 

 

‘‘As I hesitated,’’ Mr. Tchakarian told Le Parisien newspaper in February, ‘‘Georges’’ — Manouchian’s nom de guerre — ‘‘snatched it from me and threw it himself.’’

The following day, Mr. Tchakarian took part in an attack on German military police. He was also part of a small resistance cadre that assassinated Nazi SS General Julius Ritter in September 1943. Ritter had been in charge of a forced-labor program that deported hundreds of thousands of French workers to Germany to support the Nazi war effort.

The Manouchian network later became better known as ‘‘L’Affiche Rouge,’’ or the Red Poster Group, after the Nazi occupiers put up blood-red posters carrying the faces of the network’s wanted members, including Mr. Tchakarian. The Germans called them ‘‘The Army of Crime’’ and focused on the fact that many of them were Jewish.

In November 1943, Mr. Tchakarian had scheduled a clandestine rendezvous with a fellow resistance fighter, Olga Bancic, a Romanian Jew, at the Gare d’Orsay railway station in Paris.

‘‘She didn’t show up, as she always had without fail,’’ Mr. Tchakarian recalled earlier this year. He had seen pro-Nazi police in the area and escaped shortly before Bancic was arrested along with Manouchian and 22 other male members of the underground network.

On Feb. 21, 1944, all 23 men, including Manouchian, were lined up and shot by a German firing squad at the notorious Fort Mont-Valérien on the western outskirts of Paris. (More than 1,000 people, mostly Jews, were executed at the fort between 1941 and 1944.) Because French law prohibited the execution of women by firing squad, Bancic was taken to Germany, where she was beheaded with an ax.

Mr. Tchakarian fled from Paris to Bordeaux and continued the fight with the resistance. The German Luftwaffe had taken control of Bordeaux-Mérignac airport and was using it as a base for maritime reconnaissance and attacks against allied shipping in the Atlantic. Mr. Tchakarian helped provide intelligence for a 1943 raid on the airport by British and US bombers.

During the spring and summer of 1944, he joined a resistance group that, along with US Army troops, helped liberate the central French town of Montargis. The soldiers and resistance fighters were greeted with kisses, flowers, wine and delirium by residents who knew by then that the war had turned against the Germans.

After the war, Mr. Tchakarian returned to his previous occupation and became a master tailor near Paris. He also turned his focus to history, writing memoirs about his wartime experiences.

https://www.bostongl...AYzI/story.html

 

 

 

[Yervant1]

The Independent, UK

Aug 14 2018

 

 

Arsène Tchakarian: Last of WWII’s Armenian-led Manouchian network which fought the Nazis in France  

He joined a band of immigrants from countries affected by Hitler’s expansionism fighting for the French resistance

• Phil Davison                                               

 

Arsène Tchakarian was the last surviving member of the Armenian-led Manouchian network, which fought alongside the French resistance against the Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. He died at a hospital in Villejuif, south of Paris. He was 101.

• Read more

Of course Germany would refuse to deny the Armenian genocide

Tchakarian, an ethnic Armenian born in Turkey during the Ottoman Empire, later received France’s highest award, as a commander of the Legion of Honour. His family announced the death but did not specify the cause.

French President Emmanuel Macron commemorated Tchakarian on Twitter as “a hero of the resistance and tireless witness whose voice resonated strongly to the very end.”

 

The Manouchian resistance network, named after Tchakarian’s fellow Armenian, Missak Manouchian, a poet and resistance leader, was made up of immigrants from many nations that had been affected by Hitler’s expansionism – Italians, Greeks, Romanians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Spaniards, Poles, even young German Jews who had fled to what was then a free France.

“There was such a friendship between us, between all these people coming from everywhere, Jews, Spanish, Italians, Germans, Armenians and French of course,” Tchakarian said in a 2002 speech to pupils at a junior high school near his home in Vitry-sur-Seine, France. “A brotherly friendship which surpassed all that you can imagine.”

Tchakarian, with Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, is made Officer of the Legion of Honour at the Elysee palace (Getty)

Throughout the Second World War, the Manouchian network linked up with the local French Resistance to carry out a guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupiers, including broad-daylight assassinations and the sabotage of power lines and munitions trains.

Tchakarian, code-named “Charles”, started out secretly distributing anti-Nazi tracts in Paris. After meeting Manouchian, he recalled that his fellow Armenian told him: “Enough of tracts, we are now being asked to fight with arms.”

Tchakarian’s first assignment was to throw a grenade among a group of Nazi soldiers.

“As I hesitated,” Tchakarian told Le Parisien newspaper in February, “Georges” – Manouchian’s nom de guerre – “snatched it from me and threw it himself.”

The following day, Tchakarian took part in an attack on German military police. He was also part of a small resistance cadre that assassinated SS General Julius Ritter in September 1943. Ritter had been in charge of a forced-labour programme that deported hundreds of thousands of French workers to Germany to support the Nazi war effort.

The Manouchian network later became better known as L’Affiche Rouge or the Red Poster Group, after the Nazi occupiers put up blood-red posters carrying the faces of the network’s wanted members, including Tchakarian.

Anti-Manouchian network propaganda poster warns of the ‘army of crime’

The Germans called them “The Army of Crime” and focused on the fact that many of them were Jewish.

In November 1943, Tchakarian had scheduled a clandestine rendezvous with a fellow resistance fighter, Olga Bancic, a Romanian Jew, at the Gare d’Orsay in Paris.

 

 

“She didn’t show up, as she always had without fail,” Tchakarian recalled earlier this year. He had seen pro-Nazi police in the area and escaped shortly before Bancic was arrested along with Manouchian and 22 other male members of the underground network.

On 21 February 1944, all 23 men, including Manouchian, were lined up and shot by a German firing squad at the notorious Fort Mont-Valérien on the western outskirts of Paris. (More than 1,000 people, mostly Jews, were executed at the fort between 1941 and 1944.) Because French law prohibited the execution of women by firing squad, Bancic was taken to Germany, where she was beheaded with an axe.

Tchakarian fled from Paris to Bordeaux and continued the fight with the resistance. The German Luftwaffe had taken control of Bordeaux-Mérignac airport and was using it as a base for maritime reconnaissance and attacks against allied shipping in the Atlantic. Tchakarian helped provide intelligence for a 1943 raid on the airport by British and US bombers.

 

 

During the spring and summer of 1944, he joined a resistance group that, along with US army troops, helped liberate the central French town of Montargis. The soldiers and resistance fighters were greeted with kisses, flowers, wine and delirium by residents who knew by then that the war had turned against the Germans.

After the war, Tchakarian returned to his previous occupation and became a master tailor near Paris. He also turned his focus to history, writing memoirs about his wartime experiences and about the Turkish massacres of Armenians when he was a child. Most Armenians, including Tchakarian, described the killings as “genocide,” although Turkish authorities have continued to reject that term.

Arsène Tchakarian was born in 1916, to Armenian parents in what is now Sapanca, Turkey, then part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turkish purge of Armenians forced his family to flee first to Bulgaria and then to France.

 

 

Young Arsène, who adopted the French spelling of Arsène, arrived in Marseille in 1930 as an apprentice tailor. In 1937, though not yet a French citizen, he was conscripted into a French army artillery unit and fought the Nazis until they occupied France in June 1940 and he was demobilised.

He had come to consider France his home and was determined to fight on. Through Armenian connections, he soon found the Manouchians, the immigrant resistance group with nothing to lose.

 

Tchakarian was granted French citizenship in 1958. In 2005, he was made a knight of the French Legion of Honour, later upgraded to officer and finally to commander – France’s highest award – last year. His first wife, Bertha Christiane, predeceased him. Survivors include his second wife, Jacqueline Tchakarian, and four children. A complete list of survivors could not be confirmed.

 

 

In one of his last interviews, Tchakarian was asked about his time in the resistance.

“I would like to shed a tear,” he said. “But I cannot. I’ve never cried. We were not heroes. We resisted because we could do it: we didn’t have families or jobs. And we resisted because we loved France. She had adopted us.”

Arsène Tchakarian, Second World War French resistance fighter, born 21 December 1916, died 4 August 2018

https://www.independ...e-a8491796.html

[Yervant1]

Public Radio of Armenia

May 9 2020

 

 

Missak Manouchian: The French Armenian who fought fascism “…In a few hours I will no longer be in this world. We are going to be executed today at 3:00. I don’t believe it, but I nevertheless know that I will never see you again… ”

excerpt from the last letter of Missak Manouchian to his wife.

The national hero of France Missak Manouchian was born in 1906 in the city of Adiyaman of the Ottoman Empire.

From the first days of the war, he joined the fight against fascism, organizing an underground organization together with a group of associates.

The Manouchian group is credited with the assassination attempt of Paris Commandant von Schaumburg and the liquidation of SS General Julius Ritter, who was responsible for sending 600 thousand civilians to penal labor in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Together with his wife, Mélinée Manouchian, he was involved in the French Resistance against the fascist invaders, then became the leader of the FTP-MOI group (French Main-d’œuvre immigrée).

On February 21, 1944, after three months of interrogation and torture, at the age of 37, Manouchian, along with 21 members of his group, was executed by firing squad at the Fort Mont-Valérien fortress near Paris.

In order to discredit the Resistance, the Nazis published thorough Paris red posters listing the victims of the partisans and labeling them as “Army of Criminals.” Those posters read: “Manouchian: an Armenian leader of the gang, 56 attacks, 150 dead, 600 wounded.”

But to their surprise, “Affiche Rouge” or the “Red Poster” caused a wave of anger among the French people, and partisans were honoured as heroes.

https://en.armradio....fought-fascism/

 

 

[Yervant1]

News.am, Armenia

May 9 2020

 

 

 

Russia ambassador: Hard to overestimate Armenian people’s contribution to Victory

15:08, 09.05.2020

 

It is hard to overestimate the contribution of the Armenian people to the Victory. This is stated in the message of Russian Ambassador to Armenia Sergey Kopirkin, on the 75th anniversary of the victory of the former Soviet Union in World War II.

"I am convinced that for the citizens of Russia and Armenia, as well as for all the peoples of the former Soviet Union, who have borne the main brunt of the terrible war, Victory Day is a special holiday, in many ways deeply personal, in our countries there are almost no families to whom the war had not touched,” the Russian ambassador's message reads, in particular: "It is hard to overestimate the contribution of the Armenian people to the Victory. Of the 600,000 Armenians who fought on the frontlines, 300,000 did not return home.

Victory is the glorious page of our common history, our common heritage, one of the most important elements of which is the fraternal relations between the Russian and Armenian peoples, the interconnectedness of our cultures, spiritual commonality, and loyalty to eternal values.”

https://news.am/eng/news/577588.html

[Yervant1]

June 18 2023

 

Missak Manouchian, Hero Of The Resistance Of Armenian Origin, Will Enter The Pantheon

FRANCE

By David Sadler Last Updated Jun 18, 2023

 

President Emmanuel Macron will bring Missak Manouchian, a Resistance figure of Armenian origin, into the Pantheon, thus saluting his “bravery” and his “quiet heroism”announced Sunday the Elysée in a press release. “Missak Manouchian carries part of our greatness”he “embodies universal values” of liberty, equality, fraternity in the name of which he “defended the Republic”declares the Presidency of the Republic.

Military leader of a group of foreign resistance fighters in the Paris region, this survivor of the Armenian genocide was arrested in November 1943 and shot by the German army, at the age of 37, on February 21, 1944 at Mont-Valérien. He becomes the first foreign and communist resistant to enter the Pantheon. Since 2017, Emmanuel Macron has already pantheonized Simone Veil, Maurice Genevoix and Joséphine Baker.

Missak will enter the Pantheon “accompanied by Mélinee”, his wife of Armenian origin, resistant like him, who survived him 45 years and rests at his side in the cemetery of Ivry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne), specified the presidency. It was the wish of the family, as for Simone Veil and her husband Antoine, who entered the Pantheon in 2018. The Manouchian couple thus remain united in death, even if Mélinée is not herself pantheonized.

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribersMissak and Mélinée Manouchian, a couple of resistance fighters at the Panthéon?

83rd anniversary of the Appeal of June 18

This announcement coincides with the 83rd anniversary of the Appeal of June 18, which the President will commemorate as every year in the morning at Mont-Valérien, near Paris, where a thousand resistance fighters and hostages, including Missak Manouchian, were executed by the German Army during the Occupation.

A survivor of the Armenian genocide, stateless, a refugee in France in 1925, Missak Manouchian joined the communist resistance in 1943 where he distinguished himself at the head of a very active network before being arrested and shot by the Germans on February 21, 1944. Celebrated by Aragon and Léo Ferré, Missak Manouchian also entered the collective memory with “The Red Poster”plastered all over Paris by Nazi propaganda during his trial to designate his group for punishment.“The Red Poster” is also the title of a film released in 1976 which immortalized the history of the Manouchian group on screen.

Before him, eight members of the Resistance have already been honored since the transfer of the ashes of Jean Moulin in 1964, including four – Pierre Brossolette, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Germaine Tillion and Jean Zay – under François Hollande in 2015.

“I am sure that the French people and all freedom fighters will be able to honor our memory with dignity”wrote Missak to Mélinée, just before dying, also proclaiming to have “no hatred against the German people”.

The pantheonization of Missak Manouchian was ardently desired by the French left, in particular the Communist Party.

“For us, the main thing is that it is a foreigner who died for France who enters the Pantheon”underlines the communist senator Pierre Ouzoulias, whose grandfather, Albert, was the leader of Missak Manouchian in the Resistance. “It says a lot about what the French Nation is”it’s a “a strong message of integration for young people today”he told AFP.

92 resistance fighters and foreign hostages “died for France”

At the same time, 91 resistance fighters and foreign hostages shot like him at Mont-Valérien are also recognized “died for France”. At Mont-Valérien, the Head of State must collect his thoughts in the middle of the morning in the clearing of the Fusillés, where resistance fighters and hostages were executed.

He will decorate a former resistance fighter, Robert Birenbaum, who, like Missak Manouchian, came from the Francs-tireurs et partisans – Immigrant workforce (FTP-MOI) group. Georges Duffau-Epstein, son of resistance fighter Joseph Epstein who was arrested with Missak Manouchian during a clandestine meeting, will also be present.

The president will be accompanied by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, Minister for the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu and Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Thierry Burkhard.

The Head of State will then hear the Appeal of June 18 and the Song of the Partisans before a time of meditation in the crypt of Mont-Valérien, where 16 resistance fighters, officers and soldiers who died for France in 1939-45 are buried. as well as Hubert Germain, the last Companion of the Liberation.

The tribute paid on Sunday is part of a long memorial sequence around the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War which will continue in 2024 with the Normandy landings and the Liberation of Paris.

https://globeecho.co...r-the-pantheon/