I Was Raised to Hate Fascism and to Always Stand Up to Oppression
- Cet article est une traduction de :
- J’ai été élevé avec la haine du fascisme et la nécessité de toujours faire front à l’oppression [fr]
Résumé
In these conversations, Léon Landini looks back on his extraordinary family saga, which began in a small Italian village. He recounts his parents’ struggle, their forced exile to escape fascism, their arrival in France, their settlement in the Var region, and their communist activism. At sixteen, he joined the Resistance and took up arms against the Nazi occupation – a commitment that left him with lasting scars. He shares his proud memories and reminds younger generations that the verb “to resist” must always be conjugated in the present tense.
Texte intégral
1Born into a family of Italian political refugees who fled Mussolini’s regime, Léon Landini was born in 1926 in Saint-Raphaël, in the Var region of France, and was marked from an early age by his elders’ struggle against oppression. His father, Aristide, had rebelled as a teenager against the abuses of the local count in the small Tuscan village of Roccastrada. Pursued by fascist militias because of his communist political engagement, he chose exile in France – the land of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity – and brought his family there to start a new life.
2When the Second World War broke out and Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist France chose to betray the nation and lay down its arms, the entire Landini family joined the only camp to which it had ever belonged: the camp of resistance to enslavement. Faced with the Italian occupation of southern France, the Landinis took up arms in defense of the ideal of freedom. The young Léon, then sixteen, took part in his first missions under the guidance of his older brother Roger, a seasoned militant in the struggle. In 1942, he joined the clandestine Communist Party and, together with his family, entered the Resistance within the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans – Main-d’Œuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI). He participated in several acts of sabotage in the Var and in attacks against enemy troops. Detected by the authorities, he was forced to leave the region and join the maquis in the Creuse.
3In 1944, his brother Roger, a veteran responsible for training young fighters in the Lyon area, called him to join him in leading urban guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Lyon was then the epicenter of the Resistance. Léon took part in numerous “city patrols,” whose mission was to eliminate any German soldiers encountered along the way. These operations left a lifelong mark on him, for, as he would later say, “to take a man’s life is not human.”
4On July 25, 1944, he was arrested by the French police and handed over to the Gestapo, then led by the infamous Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon.” Imprisoned at Fort Montluc – like Jean Moulin before him – he was brutally tortured, as were many of his comrades, and nearly lost his life. The torture he endured, some of it at Barbie’s own hands, left him permanently disabled and earned him recognition as a Grand Mutilé de Guerre (severely wounded war veteran), Interné de la Résistance (Resistance internee), and recipient of the Médaille de la Résistance. A month later, after the German retreat, he managed to escape from prison and went on to lead a brigade of nearly 150 resistance fighters until Liberation.
5At the end of the war, after a long convalescence in hospital, Léon Landini rejoined his family in the Var before deciding to settle in Paris with his wife. Shunning honors and prestigious posts, he worked in institutional catering while remaining a dedicated activist within the French Communist Party. In 2004, faced with the renunciations of the PCF leadership under Robert Hue, he reluctantly chose to leave the party in order to remain faithful to the ideals of the Resistance and to the memory of his fallen comrades. He then founded the Pôle de Renaissance Communiste en France (PRCF), of which he became president.
6An Officer of the Legion of Honor, Léon Landini also serves as president of the Amicale des Francs-Tireurs et Partisans – Main-d’Œuvre Immigrée and of the Amicale des Bataillons Carmagnole-Liberté. He is one of the few non-Soviet citizens to have received a decoration from the Soviet Union for acts of bravery in the Resistance.
7In these conversations, on the eve of his hundredth birthday, Léon Landini looks back on his extraordinary family saga that began in a small Italian village. He recalls his parents’ struggle, their forced exile to escape fascism, their arrival in France, their settlement in the Var, and their lifelong communist activism. He shares his memories of courage and sacrifice, reminding younger generations that the verb to resist must always be conjugated in the present tense.
Salim Lamrani: Léon Landini, you were born in 1926 in Saint-Raphaël to a family of Italian immigrants. Your father, Aristide Landini, was a charcoal burner from Tuscany who fled Mussolini’s fascism in 1922. Tell us his story.
Léon Landini: As I’m about to turn one hundred, I sometimes have to wrestle a bit with my memory to keep it in line. My father came from a very poor family in a small Tuscan village. When she was young, my mother fell ill and was bedridden; they would carry her to the roadside so she could watch the first horseless carriages go by—the famous petrol cars.
In the village, there was a demonstration against the count who had seized the communal lands. The local peasants – farm laborers, all of them – rebelled against this dispossession. The security forces, invariably on the side of the propertied, came to crush the protest. The leader, carrying a red flag with the hammer and sickle, was charged by the police and fell backward. My father, barely fourteen, picked up the red banner and took his place at the head of the marchers. Naturally, he was arrested and sentenced to forty-eight days in prison. You could say it forged his character.
At the time, socialist students would travel to small villages to give talks and organize meetings. My father attended faithfully and was captivated by what he learned about socialism and capitalism. Very young, he acquired a solid ideological grounding and a clear sense of the country’s political situation.
SL: What happened next? Did the count prevail?
LL: After a hard struggle, the peasants won back the communal lands. Some time later, my father formed an agricultural cooperative and served as its secretary. Before that collective existed, the count’s steward would come to the village to recruit woodcutters and set the pay himself – no discussion possible. With the cooperative in place, workers finally had a way to free themselves from the local aristocrat’s grip.
One day the steward came to the co-op about felling one of the count’s forests and offered a price per sack of charcoal. Finding it too low, my father demanded pay commensurate with the work. The steward then tried to bribe him by conceding the higher price – but only for him personally. Far from accepting, my father immediately told all the workers about the better offer. That ended the old arrangement: from then on, negotiations had to go through the cooperative. Nearby villages, hearing of my father’s stance, also insisted that prices be set by their co-ops whenever they were approached.
SL: Your father quickly found himself in the landowners’ crosshairs.
LL: Naturally, the region’s notables came to hate him. One Sunday at four in the morning, fascists arrived in two trucks in our village – which had a socialist town hall. Tuscany had several left-run municipalities. They began hammering on the doors of local officials and activists. Instead of stopping them, the Carabinieri actually pointed out the homes of those who had stood up to the count. Fourteen villagers were murdered by these militias, with police complicity, and around sixty were wounded. They burned about twenty houses as well. Luckily, my father wasn’t in the village during that raid; even so, he was chased and shot at by these thugs on three separate occasions.
The first time I went to Italy, in 1946, I was twenty. I remember it vividly. I arrived alone in my father’s village. A woman on a small balcony called out, “Is that you, Léo?” I said it was. “Do you see those holes in the wall over there? Those are bullets the fascists fired when they were chasing your father.” You don’t forget things like that. Years later, whenever the shootings came up, my mother would start to cry. People who had committed no crime – people who simply wanted to work and earn a decent living – were massacred. My hatred of fascism goes back a long way.
SL: How did the First World War affect your family?
LL: My uncle, eight years older than my father, was conscripted and killed in action – grief my grandmother never overcame. Later my father was called up as well. To avoid conscription he first feigned insanity, without much success.
When the captain came to speak to him about defending the homeland, my father rebelled: “What homeland? I have no homeland! I spend twenty days a month in the forest making charcoal. I live like a wretch. I sleep in huts made of branches, on the bare ground. And you want me to defend that? Every day the count sends his steward to the tobacconist to buy him a packet of cigars. Let him defend the homeland! They have a homeland. I don’t.”
The Church even sent preachers to the village to urge people to enlist. My mother – very devout until then – was so outraged she never set foot in a church again. I remember her plain good sense: “It’s one of two things. If God accepts to give us war, he is not a true father. And if he does not command it, why should I pray to him? I want nothing to do with these people.” In the end, only my brother Roger was baptized. As for me, I followed that path much later, when I married. My father-in-law asked whether we planned to wed in church. I replied, “I believe in freedom. If my wife wants a church wedding, let her have one. I’ll be waiting for her outside.”
SL: So your father refused to be drafted.
LL: Yes, he deserted. But in the end, he was captured by the authorities. Starving, he had gone to one of his uncles’ homes. People saw him and denounced him, which led to his arrest and imprisonment. When he appeared in court for sentencing, the presiding judge asked if he had anything to say in his defense. My father voiced all his outrage at the fact that poor men were being sent to die at the front and told the judge that he deserved the death penalty. That speech earned him twenty years in prison. As for my mother, who secretly visited my father in the forest while he was on the run, she was also arrested for aiding a deserter and spent forty-eight days in prison.
At that time in Italy, there were 800,000 deserters. The situation was very different from France. Every family had someone in jail; there were no men left in the villages, and women had to take over the work. The 1917 Revolution had taken place, communist ideas were spreading, and Italy was in a pre-revolutionary phase. Eventually, faced with a shortage of men and mounting popular anger, a general amnesty was declared, and my father was able to return to the village.
SL: What did your father do upon his return?
LL: He immediately threw himself into politics, taking part in every election campaign. He found it inconceivable that some should live in the harshest poverty while others rolled in wealth. In his view, one had to fight for one’s rights – nothing was ever truly lost. There’s a phrase of his that has stayed with me all my life: “Even in the worst of men, there is still some good. Even the worst murderer will dive into the water to save a drowning child.” He had faith in human nature.
In 1921, when the Italian Communist Party was founded, my father naturally joined and opened a local branch in his village, where he served as deputy mayor. He was a real leader. Whenever people had problems, they came to him for advice. In Tuscany, some villages were run by communists, others by socialists, and others by coalitions of both.
One day, fascists arrived in truckloads to attack the municipal hall in Pisa, which was run by communists and socialists. The armed battle lasted two days before the assailants fled. Resistance had taken root in that area thanks to the ideological work of comrades who traveled from village to village founding cooperatives. But such attacks were spreading all over Tuscany, often with police support. The fascists focused their violence on local leaders – my father among them.
SL: And that is why he was eventually forced into exile in France.
LL: My father was convinced that if he stayed, he would eventually fall under fascist bullets. He chose France – the country of the Revolution and the Commune, whose republican motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” was inscribed on the pediments of town halls and even on churches. He packed his suitcase and, after evading the police, crossed through Luxembourg and arrived alone in Meurthe-et-Moselle in 1922. His wife and two children – my brother and sister – had stayed behind with his in-laws. When he presented himself at the iron mine, he uttered the only French phrase he knew: “Y’a de l’embauche?” (“Are you hiring?”).
He worked there for a while, but after a few weeks sensed that the French didn’t much like Italians, who made up a large part of the mining workforce. So he went to the Communist Party federation to understand the source of this hostility toward immigrants, which was preventing workers’ unity. The reason soon became clear. The French miners worked at the wagonnets and were paid accordingly. They refused – rightly – to work in unshored areas of the mine, which were too dangerous. The Italians, however, rarely used timbering and took the risk of being buried in a collapse. Work in those mines continued day and night.
The French workers didn’t strike or demonstrate because they believed the Italians wouldn’t join them. My father questioned this attitude and began ideological work among his compatriots. Then, one day, he launched a protest, demanding better working conditions. To everyone’s surprise, the French workers embraced the Italians, and together they sang The Internationale.
Naturally, the police soon took notice of my father. The local Party federation decided to remove him from the scene to prevent his arrest and extradition to Italy, where the fascists were waiting for him.
SL: So he decided to move to the south of France.
LL: There was a large Italian community in a village in the Var called Le Muy, most of them anti-fascist refugees – some even from our own village. My father decided to settle there with his family, who had joined him by then in Meurthe-et-Moselle: my mother, Viola; my brother, Arnolfo – whom we called Roger; and my sister, Lina. With Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922, he knew he wouldn’t be returning to Italy anytime soon.
I was born on April 9, 1926, and my sister Hermine the following year, in 1927.
SL: Your father did not give up his activism, however.
LL: As soon as we settled in the South, our house became a refuge for communists from all over France, some of whom stayed for several months. I remember my father warning my sister and me that we must never mention the presence of these visitors – not even to our best friends. “Otherwise, they’ll send us back to Italy, to the fascists, who will kill us.” So, from the age of ten, I learned to keep silent.
Palmiro Togliatti, the founder of the Italian Communist Party and future Minister of Justice, once spent two weeks at our home. I remember him because he limped, and my brother Roger – following an old Tuscan tradition – nicknamed him Flat Tire. I didn’t know who he really was at the time. It was only after the Liberation that I learned his true identity. My brother and I were at the cinema watching the newsreel when suddenly he shouted, “Flat Tire!” Togliatti had just appeared on screen.
I also remember a visit from Jacques Duclos, who had been a member of parliament before the war and would be again afterward. He was part of the party leadership alongside Maurice Thorez and headed the clandestine French Communist Party during the Occupation. In 1969, he ran for president and obtained over 21% of the vote, narrowly missing qualification for the second round – still the best result ever achieved by a communist candidate in a French presidential election.
Marcel Cachin also came to our house. He had first been a Socialist MP, then a Communist MP, and above all, he served as editor of L’Humanité from 1918 until his death in 1958. My father once told Cachin that I was too quarrelsome. Cachin took me on his knee and told me that a communist must persuade his comrades with words, not fists. I must admit he convinced me – I went at least eight days without a fight afterward.
SL: Your brother Roger was also politically active.
LL: My brother Roger followed in my father’s footsteps and became secretary of the Communist Youth. As for me, I left school at fourteen to work with my father in the forest as a woodcutter. That, in a few words, sums up the period that shaped the spirit of the Landini family. I was raised to hate fascism and to always stand up to oppression, whatever the danger. It is this ideal that has given me the strength to fight throughout my life.
SL: In June 1940 began Italy’s occupation of southern France, near the border, following the Armistice of Villa Incisa, which later extended in 1942. Your whole family immediately chose its side – without hesitation: that of the Resistance.
LL: My father had fled Italy, pursued by fascists with rifles. When those same fascists occupied southern France, he chose to take up arms. It was essential to show them that we cherished our freedom.
I remember my mother saying one evening at dinner: “If we take up arms, it’s likely there will be people missing from this table when the war ends.” My father replied that we had to be worthy of freedom and fight for it – so that fascists could not reproduce in France what they had done in Italy. My brother Roger, already a grown man, agreed.
It was not easy for our family – after all, the Italians were our brothers. But we had to make the occupier pay a heavy price to win our freedom. We were risking our lives, but we had to fight, to make the invader understand that liberty has a cost. We could not allow them to stroll unchallenged through the streets of Saint-Raphaël.
SL: You carried out your first act of resistance in 1942, without your family’s knowledge.
LL: I was sixteen at the time. With a friend, Jean Carrara, we bought some small stickers, without telling anyone, bearing resistance slogans such as “Pétain, you have betrayed France!”, “Long live the USSR!”, and “Less talk, more bread!”, which we stuck up all over the streets of Saint-Raphaël. Jeannot and I were like brothers.
Being two rather reckless kids, we even stuck the stickers on the door of the police station – which caused a small uproar in town. When my brother, twelve years my senior, found out what we had done, he gave me a real dressing-down. He told me, “If they catch you, the whole family will be in danger. When your time comes, I’ll tell you.” At that time, he had just been released from prison for his political activism and had far more experience than I did. Naturally, I followed his advice.
SL: How did your brother end up in prison?
LL: After the defeat of the Spanish Republicans, thousands of families were forced into exile in France. They were shamefully herded into concentration camps in the south of the country by the national authorities.
In Le Muy, we organized collections for the refugees in those camps, and my brother Roger would deliver the donations in a van. The first time, he was stopped at the entrance by the police guarding the camp, who told him to hand over the goods. They said they would take care of the distribution themselves. A little while later, we learned that the refugees had received nothing – the police had kept the entire shipment for themselves.
We were outraged by this theft of goods so generously offered by humble people who were themselves in need, yet wanted to show solidarity with their Spanish comrades. So we organized another collection. My brother went back to the camp. Once again, he was told to leave the supplies at the gate. He pretended to comply, but as soon as the police approached, he drove straight through the open gate to deliver the goods directly to the refugees.
Naturally, he was arrested, imprisoned, and threatened with deportation. It took a petition signed by nearly 4,500 people to prevent his expulsion to Italy. In the end, he got off with forty-eight days in prison.
SL: Your brother Roger eventually decided to involve you in the operations.
LL: A few months later, he asked me to accompany him on a leaflet distribution mission. Spreading leaflets required careful organization. The city was divided into sectors, and comrades worked in pairs. Once the task was completed, they were ordered to return home immediately to avoid being caught by the authorities. My brother Roger and his comrade Oscar Marucci were experts in this kind of operation.
SL: You took part in your first sabotage mission in October 1942, destroying the railway line between Cannes and Saint-Raphaël, and causing the derailment of a German freight train traveling from Ventimiglia to Marseille.
LL: That’s right. I carried out that operation with my friend Jeannot and another comrade, Alix Macario, who had fought in Spain with the International Brigades and lived in Cogolin, near Saint-Tropez. While they were unbolting the rail, I kept watch to make sure they wouldn’t be discovered. That’s how I took part in my first train derailment.
I also helped sabotage electrical and telephone lines. The authorities had posted notices stating that any saboteur caught in the act would be shot on sight. Instead of discouraging us, that only strengthened our resolve. I remember cutting a line right under the noses of Italian soldiers who were there for an inspection – as soon as they turned their backs, I acted. I was riding my bicycle home from the forest after a day’s work.
I also set fire to several vehicles. I took part in an attack on a group of soldiers gathered in a hall – we threw grenades inside. Two of them were wounded.
SL: One of your most ambitious operations – targeting an entire detachment of Italian soldiers – couldn’t be carried out because of a technical problem. Could you tell us what happened?
LL: My brother, with help from the local gunsmith, had prepared a suitcase full of explosives. It was to be placed in the restaurant of the Hôtel Bellevue, where nearly two hundred Blackshirts were holding a banquet. The restaurant was by the sea, and the force of the explosion was supposed to send them all into the water – we wanted to teach them to swim, as we said.
Jeannot and I were in charge of planting the bomb and lighting the fuse, which was meant to burn for fifteen minutes. Once the job was done, we left Saint-Raphaël and headed home to Fréjus-Plage. The bomb was set to go off after 9 p.m., at the beginning of the curfew, to avoid injuring civilians.
When the time came – nothing happened. I wanted to go back to see what had gone wrong, but Jeannot, who was a year and a half older and a bit more level-headed, stopped me; it was too dangerous, and we risked being caught. My brother spent a sleepless night.
At dawn, he took the car – with his wife beside him so as not to arouse suspicion – and drove to the restaurant. When he arrived, he saw the cleaning lady open the suitcase and run into the hotel screaming in terror. My brother left the scene at once before anyone could suspect him.
SL: This operation, among others, led the occupying authorities to tighten their grip on your family and the other comrades involved in the struggle.
LL: The OVRA – the Italian equivalent of the Gestapo – came to arrest Oscar Marucci, my brother’s right-hand man. The militiamen tried to seize Jean Carrara, but he wasn’t at home. They came to our place. I wasn’t there, but Jeannot was. Seeing them arrive, my mother managed to warn him in time, and he escaped by jumping over the garden fence.
In response, our comrades decided to send Jean Carrara to Nice to join the FTP-MOI. Sadly, he was later massacred by the SS in Digne. A street in Fréjus bears his name. As for me, I was not yet seventeen. They chose to send me to the Creuse, to my sister-in-law’s uncle, Father Logrot. My mother didn’t want me to leave alone, so the whole family followed – except my father and brother, who had to keep working the charcoal operation to support us.
I didn’t want to go, but the comrades – persuasive as ever – assured me at great length that the Resistance was waiting only for me to start the revolution. They gave me half a matchbox; the other half, they said, would be with the comrade awaiting me in the Creuse – our way of recognizing each other. I let myself be convinced, left for the Creuse, and discovered that no one was waiting for me to launch the revolution. For several months, I worked alongside the peasants.
SL: What happened to your father and brother, who stayed in the south?
LL: They refused to abandon the family home and had to keep the forestry business going to feed the family. But the Italian carabinieri, who were watching them closely because of their activism, eventually seized them. On May 12, 1943, they were taken to the villa L’Île Verte in Saint-Raphaël – owned by the mother-in-law of Couve de Murville, De Gaulle’s future prime minister – where they were brutally tortured.
After his interrogation, my brother lay in a coma for six hours. They forced him to swallow a liter of gasoline and eat a kilo of salt. They also strapped a helmet on his head so tight it burst his scalp. My father was completely disfigured. When they began beating my brother, he couldn’t help himself – he started swinging at the Italians.
When he came to, my brother feigned insanity to avoid further torture. He played it so well that only my father knew it was an act. Doctors who examined him told the authorities he’d been completely shattered and would be disabled for life. That’s how convincing he was: he soiled himself, drooled, and the flies gathered – he kept it up for nearly eight months. They were then transferred to the prison in Nice.
After the Cassibile Armistice of September 1943, the Italians went home and the Germans took over. In spring 1944, the prisoners were loaded onto a train for deportation to Germany. My father and brother jumped off shortly after departure and fled under police fire. After about 800 meters, my brother collapsed – months of immobility had left his body unfit for such an effort. My father stayed with him; they were captured and thrown back into the wagon.
At Dijon, thanks to a railwayman’s help, they finally slipped away, making their way to the Creuse over six days, switching from one train to another. I salute the solidarity of those railway workers who helped my family without asking questions and shared their meager rations with two complete strangers – one of whom barely spoke French.
SL: Once in the Creuse, you decided to join the maquis.
LL: I was told there were partisans in Belle-Sauve, a nearby village. My mother urged caution – she feared they might be militiamen posing as résistants. I went anyway and came upon a communist comrade speaking with an Italian. I told him I wanted to join the maquis. He introduced me to the leader, who first judged me too young, then accepted me after learning about my father and brother’s arrest and torture.
Thanks to Jean-Baptiste Virviale, a communist who led the FTP-F and the local maquis, I was able to take part in several actions. I joined three train derailments with a band of about a dozen maquisards, though I continued living at my parents’ place. They’d come fetch me whenever an operation was planned. To avoid capture, they changed villages every fortnight and were sheltered by local farmers.
Our village served as a marshalling yard, and the Germans would requisition livestock for a pittance, loading the animals into wagons. At night, we’d move in, disarm the two gendarmes – keeping their weapons, which we sorely lacked – and free the livestock. The villagers were on alert; as soon as we opened the wagon doors, they’d rush in to reclaim, for free, the animals they’d sold just hours earlier. By morning, the Germans had no rations. I must admit, these operations were not the most dangerous.
SL: You continued your fight against the occupiers in Lyon from 1944 onward. What were the most memorable events?
LL: The maquis was paradise compared to the city. The maquis and urban guerrilla warfare are two completely different worlds. In fact, France was the only country in Europe to practice urban guerrilla warfare.
In the maquis, you lived among comrades, surrounded by solidarity and fraternity. The danger was lesser. In the city, we lived alone, isolated from one another, constantly on alert. We couldn’t carry weapons; the armorer was the only one authorized to keep them. When an operation was planned, we’d collect our weapons, then return them once the mission was complete. For large-scale actions that required many men, it was always an urban group that took the lead, followed by units from the maquis.
When I arrived in Lyon – at my brother’s request, since he was already there supervising the young fighters on assignment from the FTP-F leadership in Limoges – I was thrown straight into the fray.
As soon as I stepped out of Perrache station, my brother, accompanied by an Italian comrade named Pierre, who was the local political officer, told me to quicken my pace to avoid the roundups that were frequent in this strategic sector. I still remember his words: “This isn’t the Limousin maquis. Here we’re in action every day, and half of our comrades have already fallen. When you kill someone in an act of resistance, you go back to your room alone and brood for hours, unable to sleep. Life expectancy here is three months. If you want to go back to the Creuse, now’s the time to say so – I’ll buy your ticket.”
Naturally, I took that as an insult and shot back, “Do you think I came here to bring shame on my brother?” My indignation made Roger laugh, and he reassured Pierre: “Don’t worry – he’s solid.”
I was assigned to a group with two older Italians, about thirty-five years old – one a political cadre, the other a military man. Both were veterans of the Spanish Civil War, men who knew what it meant to face death. Pierre told me, “Here, within a month you’ll be a veteran yourself. It’ll be your turn to train the newcomers – to show them how to make bombs and handle firearms.” I was not yet eighteen.
We could rely only on ourselves. We had no trust in the people of Lyon – tens of thousands had cheered Marshal Pétain during his visit in early June 1944, just days before the Normandy landings. We distrusted civilians like the plague.
SL: How did the operations against German officers in the streets of Lyon unfold?
LL: One thing must be understood. Given our upbringing and our ideal of building a better world, taking a life was intolerable to us. We believed in defending life.
When we went on what we called “city patrols” – these missions to execute a German officer – we went barefaced. We were sick with dread. Eight of us would go out: four on each side of the street. Two men provided cover in front; two others attacked from behind. When it fell to me to execute a German, I would fire while my comrade beside me covered me. Once the German fell, the one protecting me had to finish him off with a shot to the head – to spare him agony and avoid arousing the compassion of passersby. We would then take his weapon.
These operations had a clear purpose: the Germans had to fear walking the streets, to stop behaving as if they were in a conquered country.
The first German I executed was an airman. He was waiting for the tram, his back turned. As I approached, drawing the submachine gun hidden beneath my raincoat, a woman on the platform saw me and froze in terror. The airman turned around – and I fired a burst. Mafalda Motti, alias Simone, my bodyguard, finished him off with two bullets to the head. We walked away calmly; running would have drawn attention.
When I returned the weapon, I got an earful – they scolded me for firing sixteen bullets. It was the emotion of the moment.
The last one I killed was the day before my arrest, in front of Fort Lamotte. That area was always full of Germans. We had received new orders: not to kill them anymore, only to disarm them. There was a logic to that. A man who knows he’s going to die fights to the bitter end; one who believes you only want his weapon will surrender without resistance.
I was with young Henri, a Spaniard. He demanded the German’s weapon, but the man didn’t understand and bolted, trying to draw his revolver. I was on the opposite side of the square – and I cut him down with a burst of fire.
SL: How did you view these actions?
LL: Executing someone is the most dreadful thing a person can do. That was the unanimous feeling among us. When you pressed the revolver against a man’s stomach, you could see the terror in his face. He would open his mouth to scream, but no sound came out – he was frozen stiff with fear. It was horrible to witness.
Sometimes we had to fire several times before seeing him fall. The bullets left tiny holes, like cigarette burns. Don’t believe what you see on television, where people are struck down instantly. I never once saw anyone collapse from the first shot.
When we patrolled our sector, we kept repeating to ourselves: “Let’s hope we don’t run into any Krauts.” And when we did, when we knew the moment had come, our hearts would pound terribly. We lived side by side with death every single moment.
For years after the Liberation, I had nightmares. I would wake up drenched in sweat, thinking I had a revolver in my hand, about to execute a German. When I closed my eyes at night, I saw the holes left by the bullets. When I opened them, I saw little holes in the ceiling.
Many former comrades called me years later to tell me about their own nightmares. It was terrible.
There was a song that haunted me – Le Soldat de Marsalla – which said: “Ah, cursed be the war that makes us do such things.”
Killing a man is inhuman, and you carry the marks of it all your life.
SL: For sabotage operations, you also targeted strategic sites.
LL: We attacked factories. On the very evening I arrived, we went to sabotage the Progil plant, the largest chemical production center in Lyon, whose output was sent to Germany. My brother Roger, who held a fairly high position, had requested special permission to take part in the reconnaissance mission because he wanted to go with me. He got the authorization.
I was sent on reconnaissance with an Italian comrade to see whether there were soldiers in the factory. As we advanced through the night, my friend began humming. I ordered him to be quiet. Later, I asked him why he’d started singing. He said it was his way of mastering his fear.
And indeed, we lived with fear. Anyone who claims never to have been afraid in the Resistance is either a liar or a fool.
When we returned, we told the commando there were only workers inside. We had the night-shift workers evacuated, placed the bombs under the key machines, and blew up the factory. It remained out of service until the Liberation. We also blew up an aircraft engine plant, which stayed out of action until the end of the war.
During these actions, we confiscated the workers’ identity papers – they could always come in handy. All we had to do was replace the photograph to use them.
Once, a worker told me his papers were in another building and pretended to head for the exit. He probably wanted me to follow him into the courtyard so I’d be spotted. I brought him back to his post with a shove from the barrel of my submachine gun. Then I told little Paul, who was guarding the workers, to keep his eye on that man and shoot him in the head if he tried anything.
I can still hear Paul’s voice – cheeky and fearless – saying: “Go on, stand up a little, let’s see.”
SL: You also attacked a major convoy of German soldiers.
LL: Yes, that was one of the most spectacular operations carried out in Lyon. A group of German paratroopers was heading to a firing range in several trucks. They had to pass in front of the hospital, up a steep hill that forced them to slow down.
We positioned ourselves at the top, near the hospital, with three comrades, and were covered by another group that secured our retreat. I was the political officer of the group; Armand was the military leader. We told him to be very cautious. I was carrying the submachine gun and was supposed to shoot the driver of the first truck while the others threw grenades.
But Armand advised me not to use the gun – the second truck would have time to return fire before we could launch the grenades. So we decided to rely only on grenades.
A Spanish comrade in our group pulled the pin, hid the grenade under a handkerchief, and walked toward the truck, which was crawling up the slope. He threw it, followed by the others. I can still see the bodies of the Germans flying over the sideboards of the truck.
The press reported ten dead, but locals said there were at least thirty. It was one of the most striking attacks we ever carried out.
SL: One of your main activities was also to derail trains.
LL: Yes, we would identify trains loaded with goods bound for Germany and do everything in our power to stop them from reaching their destination.
One evening, I went to the station with the little Spaniard to note down the train schedules. We were so poor we didn’t even have watches. So my comrade brought along a big clock in a bag – it looked like it had been taken straight from the village hall! It made a loud ticking sound.
We were right by the tracks when we heard voices. A German patrol passed barely three meters away from us. My comrade had to lie down on the bag to muffle the ticking. In all, I took part in about forty derailments.
SL: What was daily life like for an FTP-MOI member? What security measures did you take to avoid capture? What were the living conditions like when you knew you were being hunted by the occupiers?
LL: We were armed and truly in danger only during operations. Unfortunately, we lost comrades in some of those attacks. Nearly half of our fighters in the city had a life expectancy of just a few months. But we faced risks every single day – especially the risk of arrest.
Let me tell you a story. One day, I was on a tram with a comrade named Étienne. There was a pretty blonde girl looking at me. I turned to Étienne and, rather proudly, said, “I think she’s interested in me.” He glanced over, then suddenly ordered me to jump off the moving tram.
We ran for about 300 meters before I asked what was going on. He said, “She wasn’t looking at you – she was looking at me.”
A few days earlier, we’d attacked a garage. While Étienne held the employees at gunpoint in one room, I was planting bombs in the engines. Once the job was done, we let everyone out, warning them not to come back because everything was going to blow. Among the employees was that same blonde woman – and she had recognized Étienne.
One of our standard safety rules was never to get on or off a tram while it was stopped. You had to jump on or off between stations, while it was still moving. And always stand by the middle door – that way you could tell if someone was following you. If you saw someone running to catch the tram after you or jumping off at the same time, it was a red flag.
When walking down the street, we’d stop in front of a shop window and pretend to fix our hair – in truth, we were checking the reflection to see if anyone was behind us.
When we were in our rooms, the older comrades advised us to observe the street without touching the curtains, so as not to betray our presence. If we spotted someone lingering outside reading a newspaper near our building, we knew to be cautious – and to escape across the rooftops if needed.
We lived in a state of constant tension. It was unbearable. But we were ready to go to the very limits of what a human being can endure – in defense of our ideals.
SL: On July 25, 1944, you were arrested in Lyon. Tell us how it happened.
LL: That was two months after my arrival in Lyon. I was arrested by Frenchmen working for the Germans – notorious villains who tortured our comrades. I had an appointment with a friend and walked past one of them on the sidewalk. I was well dressed and had my papers in order, but no money – and I wasn’t from Lyon.
He flashed his police badge and asked for my papers. Then he opened my wallet and found only fifteen francs. I told him I was expecting a money order from my mother, who lived in the Creuse. I explained that I had left the Creuse to avoid being forcibly recruited by the maquis.
My story sounded plausible, but he wasn’t convinced and ordered me into a bar.
At first, I thought it was a roundup for the STO, the Compulsory Labor Service. Since I wasn’t yet eighteen, I wasn’t particularly worried. But that wasn’t it.
Inside, there were already three men lined up against the wall, and another policeman stood over them, revolver in hand. They lined me up with them – and that’s when I realized how serious my situation was. They took us away and handed us over to the milice.
SL: You knew then that you were going to be interrogated.
LL: Yes. Once we arrived at the militia headquarters, they gave us a brutal beating. There were five of us. None of us spoke. Faced with our silence, they decided to hand us over to the Gestapo, on Place Bellecour. There, we were beaten again.
Suddenly, the leader – the most violent of them all – paused between two blows, turned to one of the men who’d been arrested, and said, “But I know you!”
The man shook his head. “No, sir.”
The leader insisted: “Yes. In 1936, you were selling L’Avant-garde on Place des Cordeliers, and you and your friends gave me a thrashing. I know you’re Jewish.”
He made us pull down our trousers to check if we were circumcised – and he was. The leader kneed him violently in the stomach. The man cried out in pain and said, “Not in the stomach – I’ve just had surgery.”
He would have done better to say nothing, because the militiaman beat him even harder. The poor fellow collapsed to the ground, blood pouring from his mouth.
That evening, when they brought us downstairs, he was still lying there. He’d been beaten to death. It took very little to lose your life at the hands of such brutes. I remember seeing men with all their teeth knocked out, and one whose eye was hanging from its socket.
I survived because the Gestapo believed I had nothing to do with the Resistance. I hadn’t uttered a word, and my papers were in order. I had two rooms in Lyon – one as my main lodging, the other as a safe house. When they asked for my address, I gave them the latter.
One of the militiamen knew the area and said, “No need to check his room. I know the landlady. If anything strange were going on, she’d have told us.”
She was a Gestapo collaborator. I realize now that I forgot to pay her a little visit after the Liberation – to ask her for some explanations.
SL: Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” who sent nearly 14,000 Jews to the death camps, personally took part in the torture.
LL: I was brutally tortured by the Gestapo as soon as I arrived. They smashed my nose completely – the septum was hanging loose. They kicked me in the head and neck, damaging my cervical vertebrae. They crushed my testicles with their boots. They wrecked me entirely – and I still suffer from it today.
It was mostly the French who did the torturing. The Germans stood by and watched.
I was lying on the ground, face down, when Klaus Barbie kicked me several times in the ribs. In agony, I turned over. He grabbed me by the jacket and shouted, “Who is your leader?”
I answered, “I have no leader.”
He struck me in the face and threw me aside, saying, “This kid won’t talk.” Then he threatened me: “If you don’t talk, we’ll give you the bathtub treatment.”
The baignoire torture meant being tied hand and foot, suspended over a bathtub, and repeatedly plunged underwater. It was horrific – you felt as if you were drowning a thousand times.
We were all just kids – barely 18, 19, or 20. You had to be that young to withstand the constant stress. I remember thinking, while they were beating me: “I just hope I can hold out and not talk.”
After a while, once the first pain had passed, only one conviction remained: “I won’t talk. They can hit me all they want – I won’t say a word.”
Psychologically, you steel yourself for any suffering – and you endure it.
We weren’t obsessed with death; what terrified us was the thought of talking if we were ever captured.
SL: You were then taken to Fort Montluc prison.
LL: Yes, they loaded me into a truck to take me to Montluc prison, telling me they were going to shoot me. That had a strange effect on me – I thought of my whole family in a single instant. I even decided I’d jump from the truck.
But once inside, they handcuffed me to an elderly man. I realized escape was impossible. In the end, it was just an intimidation tactic meant to terrify us.
We later compiled a list of 52 comrades from the Carmagnole-Liberté Battalion, close friends of ours, who were arrested, tortured, and murdered by the Gestapo. Not one of them talked. No one betrayed a friend.
We were just kids – but tough kids. We’d become adults before our time.
The Gestapo even tortured one of our comrades, Jeannine Sontag, by cutting her breasts and scalding her legs with boiling water, but she didn’t say a word. She was massacred at Saint-Genis-Laval along with 120 others.
I also remember a comrade named Alfred Viale who told me, before being led to his death: “Tell my family that I died shouting: Long live France! and Long live the Communist Party!”
SL: On August 24, 1944, the Villeurbanne uprising broke out, triggered by the Carmagnole-Liberté Battalion.
LL: The Gaullist orders were not to act – to let the Germans depart unopposed. In Lyon, the enemy even managed to blow up every bridge as they withdrew, without resistance. We were furious.
Then the radio announced that Paris had been liberated – which wasn’t quite true. Our comrades decided to head to Villeurbanne wearing FFI and FTP armbands. A jubilant crowd greeted them, shouting “Long live the maquis!” and escorted them to city hall. A friend of ours – nicknamed “the Admiral” – sent a liaison to regional command, to the leader “Lefort,” for instructions. The order came back: do nothing and go home, to avoid a clash with the Germans.
But the crowd at city hall was too large to disperse. So the comrades set up barricades, and within a few hours all of Villeurbanne was sealed off. Each barricade was commanded by an FTP-MOI fighter. With the few weapons they had, they organized city patrols. It should be said: the FTP-MOI never received weapons drops.
SL: That same day, August 24, 1944, you escaped from prison.
LL: There were 950 of us in the prison. A few days earlier, the Germans had executed 120. Sooner or later, we were all marked for death. I was in a communal cell on the third and top floor. Eight of us in a space 1.80 by 2.20 meters. When we lay down, one of us had to remain standing. The stench was dreadful. We spent the day picking lice and bedbugs off each other.
A window, barred seven times, sat 2.5 meters up the wall. As I was the thinnest and smallest, the others hoisted me up to see what was happening. We could hear gunfire. Below, in a separate barracks, were the Jews. I asked them what was going on. They spoke Yiddish, a kind of German, and understood what the Boches were saying: the soldiers were preparing to leave. Stretching my neck, I could see them heading for the gate. I dropped down and we embraced one another. Still – nothing happened.
I climbed up again and saw a man with a goatee who said: “I’m a general. I was imprisoned like you. They’ve just released me and given me the keys – on condition I open your door in an hour.” In my Provençal accent I snapped, “Beardy, if you don’t open now, I’ll break it down.” I started kicking the door. A Russian locked up with us told me to use the slop bucket instead. As I pounded away, I heard others doing the same across the prison. I managed to punch a hole through, got my head onto the landing, and as I went down the stairs, I saw several prisoners had already freed themselves.
SL: What did you do after you got out?
LL: I slipped away in the middle of the night, tore myself up on barbed wire, and knew I couldn’t linger. I made for my room, three kilometers from the prison. On the way I ran into friends from the neighborhood who had no idea I’d been jailed. Seeing the state I was in—battered and bleeding – they hurled every insult at the Germans. They gave me bread and sausage; I was starving.
The next day I went to Gerland to find Étienne and his brother, who lived with their parents. Étienne and I had done many operations together. I rang the bell; his mother opened and asked what I wanted. “Madame Palomares, don’t you recognize me?” She knew my voice, not my face. She grabbed my neck and sobbed: “Étienne said so – Léon won’t talk.” After my arrest, her husband had wanted to leave for fear for the children. She told me Étienne was at Villeurbanne city hall. An hour later he returned; our reunion was wonderful. We walked back to Villeurbanne – no trams were running.
SL: What did you do in Villeurbanne?
LL: We found the FTP staff had set up headquarters in a women’s shoe factory. A young woman with a machine gun and an armband stood guard at the door. She blocked my way and asked my business. I gave my name; I still remember her astonishment: “Léon – the dead man?”
My comrades had already held a funeral oration in the maquis and flown flags at half-mast, convinced the Germans had killed me. She ran inside shouting, “Léon is back! Léon is back!” The whole staff rushed out to embrace me, calling it a miracle. I remember one of them was barefoot.
Later I learned my brother – believing me dead – was inconsolable and didn’t know how he would tell our mother. He was in the maquis, in a hut of branches. The comrades had captured a militiaman, and two of my best friends were beating him. Seeing this, my brother Roger exploded: “Don’t you realize the Nazis did the same to my little brother?!” Much later, one of those two friends told me, “Every time I think of it, I blush with shame. Your brother taught us how to behave.”
In the end, the leadership sent my brother to rest with the family in Creuse – he’d stopped eating from worry. He had called every prison in France to find me. Convinced I’d been shot, he arrived at my mother’s; when she asked where I was, he said I’d been arrested. “No,” she answered, “he’s dead – otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
SL: Despite your state of health, the Command decided to entrust you with the Carmagnole detachment, a brigade of more than 150 men.
LL: Étienne and I had a meeting in an old school that had once served as barracks for the mobile guards. Our comrades joined us, along with many “twenty-fifth-hour resistants” – people who had never taken the slightest risk and now came to sign up with us. I was given command of nearly 160 men.
I must admit, I was skeptical about leading such a large column at my age. I remember saying, “You must be joking – I don’t even know how to march!” At first, I refused. But Norbert Kugler, a German who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and was part of the Resistance command, reminded me of my duty. He told me that all those young volunteers couldn’t simply be sent home – we needed trustworthy officers to lead them.
So I eventually accepted, and took command of the detachment.
SL: Your physical condition, however, required urgent care.
LL: Yes. In fact, Dr. Colette, who was part of the maquis and had taken part in many operations – sabotage, train derailments – told me after a few weeks that if I wanted to stay alive, I needed medical treatment. She had spoken to the comrades, and together they decided I should return to the Creuse to recover.
She wrote me a letter of recommendation and put me on the train to Guéret. I protested – I wanted to stay – but I didn’t have much choice.
SL: Before going to the hospital, you first rejoined your family in the Creuse.
LL: Yes. Once I arrived, I took a bus to reach my family. In Vieilleville, I stopped at the house of a friend I’d known during my time in the area. I knew he was hiding his car under some hay and wanted him to drive me home. He was astonished to see me, since he too thought I was dead. “Léon, you’re not dead?”
“No – since I’m standing right in front of you,” I answered.
He told me the whole village was in mourning – they thought I’d fallen in battle.
He then drove me to my family’s home. As we approached, my mother came out at the sound of the engine, afraid it might be the militia. I reassured her: “It’s me, Mama.”
You should know that my mother had dyed all her clothes black, convinced I was dead. I had tried to phone every day, to no avail, and writing was useless – there were no postal deliveries anymore. My family had spent more than twenty days after my escape with no news from me.
Our reunion was pure joy – they were all fighting just to embrace me. During dinner, my mother said something that deeply moved us: “When this war began, I was convinced that by the end there would be empty chairs around this table. All three of you were arrested. You suffered so much. But you’re all here. This is the happiest day of my life.”
It was deeply emotional.
SL: You then spent a long time in the hospital.
LL: I stayed in the hospital for over a year and a half – from October 1944 to February 1946 – which gives you an idea of the state the fascists had left me in. I had multiple head wounds, including two depressions in the skull. Pus ran down my neck.
Since there were no antibiotics in Lyon, they insisted I be sent to the hospital in Guéret. My vertebrae were badly damaged, and the doctors were pessimistic about my chances of survival. I remember hearing them say, “This poor fellow won’t live long.”
I think they were a bit mistaken.
SL: Who were the most important people you met during the Resistance?
LL: Every comrade I met was important, because I looked at each one wondering if they would still be alive the next day. Every friend was precious to me. All our encounters were moving. The most powerful moments were when we came across a comrade we thought was dead – and he came to embrace us. The emotion we felt then was beyond words.
SL: Many women suspected of having had relationships with Germans were shaved and mistreated after the Liberation. As a member of the Resistance, what do you think of the fate that befell them?
LL: One day after the Liberation, I was with my friend Étienne – we were often together. We came across a group harassing a woman whose head had been shaved and marked with a swastika. Our blood boiled. We drew our revolvers and shouted that the next person to touch her would get a bullet: “The Krauts did the same thing – and better than you. We didn’t drive them out so you could take their place!”
That wasn’t worthy of a liberated France. You can’t treat people like that. They all lowered their eyes and took the woman to the authorities.
I’d be lying if I said I witnessed many such cases. This was the only one I personally saw.
SL: What can you tell us about justice after the Liberation? You’ve pointed out that the same Pétainist magistrates who had Resistance fighters executed were later involved in the Purge.
LL: I’ll give you just one example – among hundreds.
A gamekeeper from eastern France, named Aimé, managed an estate, half of which was occupied by the Germans. When Jews tried to cross into the Free Zone, Aimé would escort them to the border.
After the Liberation, he was arrested and convicted of imaginary crimes, then imprisoned. Later he lived for almost a year with my brother Roger, because there were threats to send him back to prison. The police didn’t dare come to the Landini house – we carried a certain authority because of our role in the Resistance.
My brother intervened several times with the Socialist deputy Jean Charlot. He met with the lawyer who had defended Aimé for nearly fifteen years, and she told us that almost a thousand Resistance fighters were in prison for actions carried out against the occupier. The same judges who had sentenced them before the Liberation continued to work against them after 1945.
In Paris, a Resistance fighter named Paul had shot an informer who had denounced his comrades. The informer turned out to be the father of a captain in de Gaulle’s army. When the son learned what had happened, he filed a complaint against Paul, who was the leader of the group that carried out the attack.
Paul was arrested, and for forty-eight days we had no news of him. We didn’t know what had become of him. After two months – thanks to our petitions – he was finally released on bail.
I had known him during the Occupation: he was wanted by the police and had gone into hiding at his aunt’s house in Saint-Tropez. But since her husband was under surveillance, the FTP decided to send him to my home in Saint-Raphaël.
Paul died forty years later, still on provisional release – never officially declared innocent. It was a scandal to condemn a man who had risked his life for his country’s liberation.
That was “justice” after the Liberation.
SL: Tell us about your friendship with Alter Mojsze Goldman, Jean-Jacques Goldman’s father, whom you met in Lyon.
LL: Alter was in charge of the Jewish combat groups in Lyon. We were preparing to attack the Éclair garage, where large German trucks were parked that needed to be neutralized. We knew German troops might be present.
When I arrived, I saw two “old men.” They were at least thirty – and for us, who weren’t yet eighteen, that was already old. I asked my friend Étienne who they were, and he told me their names. That’s how I met Alter.
Twenty years later, I organized a reunion in the Lyon area attended by nearly four hundred people. I noticed a man staring at me. I went up to him and asked, “Weren’t you in the Resistance?” He said yes. “Weren’t you at the Éclair garage?” I asked. He began to cry and hugged me. It was Alter.
I remember a conversation with his son, Jean-Jacques, who saw us as heroes. I told him that none of us had ever aspired to be heroes. We lived in constant fear – but our duty demanded that we overcome that fear to act against the Occupier.
We were driven by faith in another kind of world – one we hoped would be better.
SL: How did your return to civilian life go after the Liberation?
LL: After two years in the hospital, I returned to the Var in May 1946, where my entire family had settled again. There were about ten of us in the house – my parents, my brother with his wife and two children, and my sister with her child. Every meal was like a party cell meeting, and we spoke the Italian way – loudly, with the windows wide open. That’s how I received my political education.
I then took charge of a small forestry operation. I worked long hours – sometimes up to seventeen hours a day. A comrade even went to see my wife and mother to warn them that I wouldn’t last long if I kept it up. I was sleeping barely four hours a night. I supervised a small crew of about forty lumberjacks. It was also from the Algerians that I learned how to strip cork.
After the Liberation, it wasn’t easy to impose anti-social measures, because the unions and the Party were strong. Out of forty million French people, five million were members of the CGT and eight hundred thousand of the Communist Party. That’s why the United States helped create Force Ouvrière through American unions – which were themselves financed by the U.S. government.
I naturally led an activist life, like the rest of my family. My sister Hermine was secretary-general of the Communist group in the National Assembly for thirty-seven years. I was always very close to my whole family. My brother Roger had paved the way, and I fought alongside him. I was proud to be his brother – he was respected by everyone. In Saint-Raphaël, the Landini family was well regarded – and we were all Communists.
SL: You became head of security for the Party section in Saint-Raphaël.
LL: At the end of the war, when I was demobilized, my brother Roger – head of the local PCF section – proposed to the comrades that I be appointed head of security. Nearby were soldiers preparing to leave for Indochina or Algeria who constantly disrupted our meetings.
It’s important to remember that at the time, those who had “softly” collaborated during the war could redeem themselves and be officially cleared by serving two years in the colonies. You can imagine the mindset and values of such people.
I accepted my comrades’ proposal. During one of our meetings, a group of fascists showed up to cause trouble. I spotted their leader and walked straight up to him. I didn’t say a word – I just landed a punch square in his face, and he dropped like a tree trunk. I finished him off with a few kicks, and they never came back.
That’s how you deal with fascists.
I have to admit, I had quite a punch in those days. Now I’m nearly a hundred years old, though there’s still a bit of fire under the ashes. I turned to my friends with a grin and said, “You see? When you know how to convince people, they understand.”
You have to be ready to take blows – and never back down.
SL: You then decided to move to the capital.
LL: When my brother died, more than a thousand people attended his funeral – a testament to the respect he commanded in the city. I was deeply affected and went six months without working. My wife was Parisian, and her dream had always been to return to the capital. My sister was already there, so we decided to leave Saint-Raphaël.
In Paris, I first worked in advertising – what I used to call la réclame. After three months, I was offered a position managing large-scale catering: the restaurants of the ORTF, Alstom, and the newspaper La Croix, serving a total of 25,000 meals a day.
I worked hard – probably too hard – but that suited my temperament.
SL: Official history – or “polite history,” as Henri Guillemin would call it – tells us that it was the United States that liberated France and Europe from Nazism. What’s your view on that?
LL: At the Liberation in 1945, polls showed that 57% of the French believed they had been freed by the Soviets, 20% by the Americans, and 12% by the British. A survey conducted in 2015 gives shocking results: 54% of the French now believe they owe their freedom to the Americans, 23% to the Russians, and 18% to the British.
That’s the result of media indoctrination – a rewriting of history to defend the interests of the powerful, at the expense of truth and of the respect owed to those who gave their lives for the freedom of our country. It’s scandalous to falsify history to such an extent.
Today, the media often portray the Russians as common bandits during the Second World War. We must remember that before the Battle of Stalingrad, which marked the turning point against Nazism, we fought with the hope of building a better world. After Stalingrad, we fought with the conviction that we would build one – by crushing fascism and the exploitation of man by man.
People often talk about Auschwitz – but they systematically forget to say that this death camp was liberated by the Soviets.
SL: What is your view of General de Gaulle?
LL: My opinion is mixed. There was an honorable side to the man, and he showed a certain integrity. I remember his 1944 statement praising the role of Soviet soldiers in the liberation of France – a historical truth few people on the right ever acknowledged. He also stood firm against the Americans, who wanted to take control of the country.
On the other hand, he was a conservative who defended the interests of the French upper bourgeoisie. As soon as the National Council of the Resistance’s program began to be implemented, the six Communist ministers in the government were dismissed – with no respect whatsoever for the struggle we had waged to liberate the homeland.
I also regret that he never gave due recognition to the decisive role played by French Communists in resisting the Occupation.
SL: What do you think of Jean Moulin’s arrest and assassination? What are the gray areas in your view, as someone who was in the Resistance at the time?
LL: Let me turn the question around: if Moulin hadn’t been assassinated, who would have led France? There would have been a duel between de Gaulle and Moulin. The truth is, Moulin was an inconvenience for many people.
At that fateful meeting which led to his arrest, precautions had supposedly been taken. The rendezvous point had been set 500 meters from the actual meeting place. None of the participants knew the precise location – only the organizers did. They were escorted there one by one.
But there are several troubling questions. How is it that René Hardy, who had been arrested by the Gestapo forty-eight hours earlier and then released, was able to attend the meeting? Why was there no one posted in the courtyard to keep watch and alert the Resistance leaders with a whistle if something went wrong? And how is it that Moulin had no escort to protect him?
There’s no formal proof of a conspiracy, but the suspicions are many. I still can’t understand how they were captured so easily. Jean Moulin placed his trust in people who, deep down, wished him dead.
SL: Let’s turn to the recent induction of Missak Manouchian of the FTP-MOI into the Panthéon on February 21, 2024, marking the 80th anniversary of his execution. Is this a belated but welcome recognition?
LL: Finally – eighty years later – the role of the FTP-MOI is being acknowledged. Never before had a national tribute been paid to the forces of the left. But the fight to obtain that recognition was long and difficult.
From the outset, in order to avoid mentioning the Communist Resistance, the authorities chose to highlight his nationality and Armenian origins. Yet, in truth, there were no Armenian or Italian resistance fighters as such – there were French resistance fighters. The struggle took place in France.
Once again, they sought to perpetuate the ostracism that had long targeted the Communist Resistance – though it was the Communists who fought most valiantly against the Nazi occupier.
SL: It’s true that at first, when the Pantheonization was announced, Manouchian was described as “the Armenian,” with his Communist identity left aside.
LL: Yet we were the first to take up arms against fascism. From the very outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, our Communist comrades joined the Republicans to block the rise of Franco’s forces.
The French Communist Party (PCF) called on its members to enlist in the International Brigades, and there was a remarkable unity among Communists in that struggle. Later, the brigadistas were officially recognized in France by Jacques Chirac’s government, which granted them veteran status.
By contrast, Léon Blum, then President of the Council, signed a non-intervention agreement just fourteen days after the war began – even though 150,000 Germans and Italians were already supporting Franco’s fascists.
Worse still, when Spanish refugees fled to France, they were herded into concentration camps on the beaches, in appalling conditions.
SL: The Communists were also the first to rise up against the Nazi occupiers.
LL: Have we forgotten Charles Tillon’s appeal of June 17, 1940? You can’t rewrite history.
In 1940, my brother Roger went to the Fréjus-Plage train station – a sorting center – with one of his comrades to derail locomotives. To put them back on the tracks, a crane had to be brought in from Carnoules, sixty kilometers away – a former communist town hall where the railway workers still had red blood running through their veins. I can assure you, they took their time sending that crane. The station was blocked for nearly a week.
When people claim that the Communists waited until the Soviet Union was attacked before taking action, that’s completely false – and what my family did is living proof. These slanders are intolerable.
Likewise, in the North, in 1940 and 1941, there was a strike of 100,000 miners that lasted several days. Many were shot or deported. Can we just sweep that aside? We must honor those who shed their blood for the liberation of the homeland – long before the Soviet Union entered the war.
It’s sheer bad faith to claim that the Communists did nothing to oppose the Nazis. The Communist Party was the only one to publish a resistance newspaper as early as December 1940, La Pensée Libre. The first clandestine journal of the intellectual Resistance was founded in April 1941 by the Communist Jacques Ducour.
The writer and Resistance fighter Jean Bruller, known as Vercors – who wasn’t even a Communist – publicly denounced the slander against the Communists, who were the first to organize a network in 1940. For a long time, the Communists stood alone in fighting the Nazis.
SL: The role of the FTP-MOI – the immigrant fighters – was praised at the Liberation, even though it was later erased from official history.
LL: Charles Tillon, commander of all the FTP, said that the FTP-MOI was “one of the finest – if not the finest – jewels of the French armed Resistance.”
We could not simply be brushed aside, not after the battles we had fought against the Occupier across all of France. You couldn’t erase the memory of my comrade Simon Fried, who died on the guillotine shouting “Long live the Communist Party!”, defying his executioners to his final breath.
For decades, successive governments did everything possible to conceal the vital role of the FTP-MOI in the Resistance. They didn’t want people to know that France owed part of its liberation to immigrants who fought fascism with weapons in hand.
Today, at the Resistance Museum in Lyon, there isn’t a single word about the FTP-MOI – even though we carried out more than half the military operations against the Germans in that city. There’s no mention of the Carmagnole Battalion, no photograph of Norbert Kugler, a German who led the entire Resistance in the region.
And in Grenoble, at the Resistance Museum, the FTP-MOI aren’t mentioned either, even though they carried out the largest single operation in France, neutralizing nearly 120 Germans. This is how history is erased.
In 2019, the European Parliament even passed a resolution placing communism and Nazism on the same footing. That is an unspeakable disgrace! It was the Communists who fought the Nazis, weapons in hand!
SL: It’s worth noting that you almost didn’t attend Manouchian’s Pantheon ceremony – even though you are the last surviving member of the FTP-MOI. The Presidency only invited you at the last minute.
LL: When I learned from the press that a national tribute was to be paid to Missak Manouchian, I wrote several letters to the President of the Republic, reminding him that I was the only surviving FTP-MOI fighter – and that our flag had to be present at the ceremony.
In my third and final letter, I even pointed out that it seemed my presence was unwelcome because of my Communist affiliation.
The next day – literally the day before the ceremony – I finally received an official invitation. By then, the story had made the press, and I had given several interviews on the subject. It had become difficult to exclude me from the tribute.
A car from the Élysée Palace came to pick me up and take me to the Panthéon. When I arrived, there was a large military presence – at least a hundred soldiers in full dress uniform. I had informed the protocol officer that my daughter would help me walk and that my son-in-law would carry the FTP-MOI flag.
The officer told me that no flags were allowed. I replied that I would not enter the Panthéon without my flag – which was also Manouchian’s flag.
He went to speak with the President, who decided to come personally to escort me – with my flag.
It was raining, and President Macron himself held the umbrella over me. He was getting wet, while I was dry. We were escorted past the soldiers, who presented arms – and Manouchian was honored under his true colors.
I must say, the President’s speech was not without substance. He even used the word “Communist” several times. I believe he must have revised his text the night before to include that reference, because of my presence.
It’s worth noting that Pravda, in Moscow, had published my final letter. The President thanked me for attending.
It was a beautiful victory.
SL: Manouchian was refused French citizenship twice, as was your brother Roger. Nevertheless, he became one of the great heroes of the anti-fascist and anti-Nazi struggle. What does that inspire in you, at a time when nauseating debates about national identity are flourishing?
LL: When my brother was refused French citizenship, I must admit honestly that we weren’t particularly saddened. It was, in a way, a kind of tribute that capitalism paid us – by refusing to grant naturalization to a communist militant.
We eventually had to go through a friend named Brailland, head of the construction workers’ union, who had a few contacts in the Ministry. Thanks to him, my brother was finally naturalized, after two refusals. So we entered, so to speak, through the back door – through the intervention of that comrade. It was a fine victory.
SL: What do you think of the growing normalization of racist discourse?
LL: Racism must be fought, in all its forms, with the utmost energy. My hatred of racism goes back to my childhood. I remember hearing French people call Italians “dirty macaroni.” Since I’m of Italian origin, I took those insults personally – and I couldn’t stand them. Racism has always revolted me, and it still does, even at my age.
Whenever I hear racist remarks, I get angry and react with the same intensity as when I was twenty. Racists have no place in France, because here we defend freedom and the well-being of everyone. It’s easy to attack foreigners, the vulnerable, the weak. Let them try that with me, and they’ll see!
When facing racists, you have to have the same fighting spirit I do. If I came across one, I’d confront him – even now, at my age. You must never let people like that get away with it. I’d give them a good slap in the face, and I can guarantee you – from experience – that they’d calm down right away!
Insults and contempt must never go unanswered. That’s why I tell everyone who’s the target of such abuse: be assertive, even combative, toward your aggressors. Ever since I was a child, I was taught never to let anything slide. When people come looking for me – they find me.
Let’s also remember that among the founding leaders of the National Front – now the National Rally – were individuals who had fought in the German army. It’s a party founded by former Waffen-SS members! The National Front was born of fascism. Several of its founders were former members of the Gestapo. As for Jean-Marie Le Pen, he himself admitted to torturing Algerians – and even boasted about it.
SL: And what do you think of the far right’s participation in Manouchian’s Pantheon ceremony?
LL: When the President of the Republic came to see me at the end of the ceremony and asked whether I was satisfied with the positive response to my requests, I said yes. But I also told him of my outrage at seeing there the heirs of those I had fought – weapons in hand – and who had murdered so many of my comrades. They had no place in the Panthéon.
I remember his response: “You read what I said about their presence correctly.” And it’s true – he had clearly stated that the far right was not welcome at the ceremony. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella forced their presence, but they had no business being there. Their political ancestors were on the side of the Nazis.
SL: What remains today of the ideals of the Resistance?
LL: The program of the National Council of the Resistance was written with the blood of the fighters who gave their lives for freedom and for the building of a better world.
When my father received his first pension, he had tears in his eyes. He said our struggle had changed the world. There were paid holidays, which didn’t exist before. When my father got his first time off, he couldn’t believe it: “They’re paying me even though I’m not working!” Just imagine!
We achieved all that right after the war, when the country was in ruins. And today, when the country overflows with wealth, we’re told it’s no longer possible!
Sadly, much of what the CNR program accomplished has already been dismantled. Just look at the recent pension reform.
SL: In 2004, you left the French Communist Party to found the Pôle de Renaissance Communiste en France (PRCF), of which you are the president. What led to this break?
LL: For some time, when Robert Hue was leading the Party, I no longer agreed with the PCF’s positions. Things kept getting worse. They were no longer the Communists I had once known – people marked by honesty, integrity, and straightforwardness.
So I gave up my Party card and distanced myself from the PCF. It was heartbreaking to see what had become of the Party for which so many of my comrades had died.
One day, there was a public meeting in Ivry-sur-Seine, organized by Henri Alleg, Georges Hage, Georges Gastaud, and others. I went with my wife and was pleasantly surprised to hear the speakers express exactly what I was thinking.
Later, Henri Alleg came to see me several times, telling me that I couldn’t remain inactive – that I had to continue the struggle within some structure. I eventually let myself be convinced, and together we decided to create the PRCF.
The board proposed appointing me president, and I ended up accepting.
SL: What is your view of the Cuban Revolution?
LL: The Cuban people are doing an extraordinary job – standing alone against the world.
For my part, I support Cuba without reservation. It is a small, flickering flame that still burns on the horizon. The mere fact that this country continues to call itself Marxist-Leninist and resists imperialism earns it my deepest respect and admiration.
And if Cubans are subjected to such relentless hatred from anti-communists – a hatred as fierce today as ever – it must be because they are very close to the truth.
SL: What message would you like to leave to young people and to future generations?
LL: A people that does not fight for its freedom is unworthy of freedom. A people that does not fight for its ideals is unworthy of those ideals.
To build a free, strong, democratic, and independent France, the people must unite on clear and solid foundations. We must speak to the workers and the humble – those who suffer the most. We have both the right and the duty to rise up against any attack on human dignity.
As I approach the twilight of my life, I look back on my past with great pride. Even when I view it critically, I have nothing to regret.
In every circumstance, I have always stood on the side of the poor, the oppressed, the exploited – with the anti-colonialists, the anti-racists – in short, on the right side of the barricade.
Even today, I continue to fight so that I remain worthy of the memory of my comrades who fell in battle. I want to be worthy of the memory of Alfred Viale, who was murdered by the Nazis shouting, “Long live the Communist Party!”
If I should meet him in some possible afterlife, I want to be able to say to him: “All my life, I fought to be worthy of you.”
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Salim Lamrani, « I Was Raised to Hate Fascism and to Always Stand Up to Oppression », Études caribéennes [En ligne], 15 | Novembre 2025, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2025, consulté le 12 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudescaribeennes/37894 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15375
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.
Haut de page



