Armenian fighter joins France's Pantheon heroes

PARIS

An Armenian poet who was born in Turkish province of Adıyaman and died fighting the Nazi occupation of France during World War II on Feb. 21 became the first non-French Resistance fighter to enter the Pantheon mausoleum for national heroes.

The honor to Missak Manouchian has been seen as long-overdue recognition of the bravery of foreign communists who fought the Nazis alongside members of the French Resistance.

Members of the French foreign legion carried the coffins of Manouchian and his wife Melinee, also a member of the Resistance, draped in French flags into the secular temple.

The names of 23 of his communist comrades-in-arm were added to a commemorative plaque inside the monument.

“Grateful France welcomes you,” French President Emmanuel Macron said during the ceremony on Feb. 21.

The roughly 2,000 people invited to the ceremony include Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and representatives of the French Communist Party.

He was born in Adıyaman in Türkiye’s south in 1906 during the Ottoman era. Manouchian arrived in France in the mid-1920s.

He joined the French communist party’s armed resistance in 1943, soon leading dozens of foreigners fighting the German occupiers in the Paris region.

Under his watch they carried out sabotage, derailed trains, attacked German soldiers and assassinated a German SS colonel in charge of the forced enlistment of French workers.

Manouchian was arrested in November 1943 and tortured before being shot dead by firing squad aged 37 with around 20 of his comrades in February 1944.

After their death sentences, a Nazi propaganda poster showing images of ten from the group on a red background, which became known as the “red poster,” sought to demonize them as members of a “criminal army.”

But it backfired, and later inspired a poem by French poet Louis Aragon, a song and several films.