Arsène Tchakarian, World War II resistance fighter in France, 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.

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.