Resistance fighter Tchakarian, 101
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
Arsen Tchakarian was born Dec. 21, 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 Arsen, 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 demobilized.
Tchakarian was granted French citizenship in 1958. In 2005, he was made a knight of the French Legion of Honor, later upgraded to officer and finally to commander — France’s highest award — in 2017. 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.