In 1942 he was 18 years old. Committed to the Resistance within a group of Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP), her name was Rainer. Madeleine Riffaud died on the morning of Wednesday, November 6, in her Parisian apartment, at the age of 100, we learned. the world of those around him, confirming the information of Humanity. Before being a journalist, war correspondent in Vietnam and Algeria and renowned poet, she was an emblematic figure of the resistance to the Nazi occupier.
He was born on August 23, 1924 in Arvillers (Somme). The daughter of teachers, she grew up in the lands of Picardy, still marked by the horrors of the First World War. “A real cemetery”, she said. After becoming a student in Paris after the debacle, the young woman wrote poems and joined the Resistance. A member of the faculty combat group, Liaison Officer Rainer – an alias he had chosen in reference to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke – entered armed combat in 1943. Mentioned in the Army Order of Gaulle and the War Cross with Palms During the Liberation, the young Madeleine often volunteered for the most radical and dangerous actions.
a heroine
Although she denies it, Madeleine Riffaud was a heroine. In 1942, during a stay in a sanatorium not far from Grenoble, he encountered the Resistance. He recovered from tuberculosis in this establishment built in the heart of the Chartreuse massif and run by Dr. Daniel Douady. “A great guyhe stated, who went to Pétain to feed his patients and housed a clandestine printing press at the service of the Resistance in the basement of his clinic. » In 1944, in the weeks following the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre perpetrated on June 10 by the Das Reich division, the FTP Resistance general staff launched the motto: “to each his own”. On July 23, a beautiful summer Sunday, Madeleine killed a German non-commissioned officer on a bridge over the Seine – the Solferino footbridge – in broad daylight. Point blank. Two bullets in the head. “Don’t think it was something funny. Not anything hateful. As Paul Eluard would have said, he had taken up the weapons of pain. (…) “He fell like a sack of wheat.”he wrote later.
Caught almost in flagrante delicto by a militia leader who was nearby, she was handed over to the Gestapo, who imprisoned her in the Rue des Saussaies. There, for three weeks, they interrogated her to give the names of the members of her group; she was tortured but did not speak. Sentenced to death, she was imprisoned in Fresnes prison (Val-de-Marne), but at the last moment she escaped execution. The SS want to confront her with a French police officer who, a few weeks earlier, was attacked in the Bois de Vincennes, where his service weapon was stolen. The same one that was used on July 23 on the Solferino walkway to kill the German non-commissioned officer.
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