Arsène Tchakarian (1916–2018)
Arsène Tchakarian was the last surviving member of a Communist military unit in the French Resistance. Mainly Jews and immigrants, they risked everything to fight the Nazi occupation.
Arsène Tchakarian. YouTube
Arsène Tchakarian, who died on August 4 aged 101, was the last surviving member of the “Groupe Manouchian,” a military unit active in the French Resistance. Named after its leader Missak Manouchian, this Communist network mainly composed of Jews and immigrants carried out numerous armed attacks on the German occupation forces. Twenty-three of its members were executed and three others killed in action. Tchakarian and his comrades fought both as Communists and in defense of their adoptive homeland.
An Immigrant Communist
The Manouchian group in which Tchakarian fought was part of the “Immigrant [or Foreign] Workforce” (MOI) partisan formation attached to the Communist-led Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP). He like its leader Manouchian was an Armenian, born in 1916 to a family escaping the genocide in the Ottoman Empire. Having arrived in France as a teenager in 1930, using a Nansen refugee’s passport, he soon became active in the CGT trade union. He met the Communist poet Manouchian as early as 1933, during efforts to raise famine relief for their native Armenia.
The MOI’s history began long before the war. Already in 1924 the Communist-led General Confederation of Labor (CGT) formed a special organization for the Foreign Workforce, which adopted the name MOI in 1932. With French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish-speaking sections, the MOI was also key to mobilizing French-based communists to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Migrants whose own countries had fallen to fascism played an especially prominent role in the International Brigades’ fight against Francisco Franco.
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