Tailor fought Nazis in Armenian group that worked alongside French resistance
Arsene Tchakarian, who has died aged 101, was the last surviving member of the Armenian-led Manouchian network, which fought alongside the French resistance against the Nazis.
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. 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 Armenian poet and resistance leader Missak
Manouchian, was made up of immigrants from many nations 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 school near his home in Vitry-sur-Seine, Paris. ‘‘A brotherly friendship which surpassed all that you can imagine.’’
Throughout the war, the network linked up with the French resistance to carry out a guerrilla campaign against the Nazis, including daylight assassinations and sabotage of power lines and munitions trains.
Tchakarian, codenamed Charles, started out secretly distributing anti-Nazi tracts in Paris, until Manouchian told him: ‘‘Enough of tracts, we are now being asked to fight with arms.’’ His first assignment was to throw a grenade among a group of soldiers. ‘‘As I hesitated, Georges [Manouchian’s nom de guerre] snatched it from me and threw it himself,’’ he said earlier this year.
The following day, he took part in an attack on German military police. He was also part of a small resistance unit that assassinated Nazi SS General Julius Ritter in September 1943. Ritter had been in charge of a forcedlabour 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. The Germans called them ‘‘The Army of Crime’’ and focused on the fact that many of them were Jewish.
In November 1943, Tchakarian had set up a clandestine rendezvous with a fellow resistance fighter, Olga Bancic, a Romanian Jew, at the Gare d’Orsay station in Paris. ‘‘She didn’t show up, as she always had without fail,’’ Tchakarian recalled earlier this year. He escaped shortly before Bancic was arrested, along with Manouchian and 22 other male members of the underground network.
On February 21, 1944, all 23 men, including Manouchian, were lined up and shot by a German firing squad. 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. 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.
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.
Arsen Tchakarian was born 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, then to France.
Young Arsen, who adopted the French spelling of Arsene, 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 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 – in 2017. In one of his last interviews, he said: ‘‘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.’’
His first wife, Bertha, died before him. Survivors include second wife Jacqueline and four children. – Washington Post
‘‘We were not heroes. We resisted because we could do it: we didn’t have families or jobs ... [and] we loved France. She had adopted us.’’