a thousand and one struggles – Liberation

Tortured by the Gestapo, actress in the Liberation of Paris, targeted by the OAS, reporter during the Vietnam War… The resistance fighter and left-wing poet never stopped, until her last breath, fighting and testifying. She died on Wednesday November 6 at the age of 100.

“On the walls there are screams / Words engraved with a nail. / Oh despair, or mad hope / Of those who died before me… / I feel that they are still there / Around me, and watching me.” At the beginning of August 1944, Madeleine Riffaud, “Rainer” as she was a resistance fighter, was imprisoned in Fresnes. A few days earlier, she killed a German officer, because those were orders, and because she wanted to avenge a comrade. She was captured and has been tortured by the Gestapo ever since. In her cell, in the rare moments of calm, the young woman writes poems, with a lead pencil given by a jailer, in the margins of a copy of the Imitation of Jesus Christ. She evokes the abuse suffered, those who died, the screams she hears at night, the rats that pass in front of her, the forgiveness that must be granted to the enemy, “Those tomorrow will kill me. Don’t kill them in turn / Tonight my heart is nothing but love.” She is preparing to die. She does not know that she will survive and heroically participate, at the end of that same month, in the Liberation of Paris, while celebrating her 20th birthday. Later, she will say (1): “It is not with impunity that we accepted his death and that we have to start all over again. Being a survivor was difficult for me because I was sick, in my mind and in my body.”

Madeleine Riffaud, who died on Wednesday November 6 in the early morning, at 100 years, two months and a few days, was one of the last resistance fighters in