European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

For three years, I was an apprentice butcher, but did not like it at all. I started working in construction, as a metal worker.

I worked very hard.

My parents, my father was a metal worker, a hard working man. He repaired ships.

Sometimes he worked on two or three ships a week. My mother was a textile worker.

I have my elementary school certificate. I was barely twelve years old.

My birthday is in the end of August and I got the certificate in June.

It was important to me. Afterwards, I started working.

And as I had very little ideas about what I wanted to do I became an apprentice butcher.

I worked there for three and a half years. I started to learn about the work. But in the end I never became a butcher.

Then I started working in construction, in civil projects, doing repair work on ships.

I did all sorts of different things, always manual work though.

I was 16 years old in 1936 and I worked in factories.

I had simply become a worker and got to know the whole period of 1936, the strikes and all that it represented.

The strikes of 1936 were the beginning of it all.

There was a labour movement that manifested itself. I was already part of the working class.

In these conditions the 1936 movement manifested itself a little bit everywhere and there were big demonstrations.

It meant very much to the working class movement in France. It was important.

Reasons for resistance

I would have been disloyal to my own convictions, if I hadn’t joined the resistance.

My grandfather was jailed in the KUK Empire,