European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Going in the underground; Activities

One could be part of the resistance movement and have a normal occupation as well.

I worked in the Simca factory.

That was an Italian enterprise. The director, Mr.Picosi, was Italian.

They produced cars before the war. During the occupation, we were forced to produce axels for tanks.

We started sabotaging the machines during our work.

In the beginning of 1943, Hitler had begun to lose some battles.

He lost the battle of Stalingrad, the battle in Libya.

He had to mobilize his entire male population, having occupied almost whole Europe.

He had to keep his war machinery going.

An agreement was signed between the French Pétain-Laval government

and the German administration to create the so-called STO (Forced Labor).

In the beginning, they tried it with propaganda, saying that one worker going to work in Germany would liberate ten Prisoners of War.

That didn’t work well, as very few volunteered.

From then on lists with the names of some of the workers were sent to the factories.

If your name was on that list, you had to leave to work in Germany.

One day I saw my name on one of these lists.

We were supposed to have a medical check-up in Courbevoie, with a German major.

I had a hernia, which in reality didn’t bother me.

But I arrived there as if in pain, saying that my doctor had told me I needed to be operated on immediately.