European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

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,

Emperor Royal Monarchy of the Habsburgs, because he fought for socialism.

My father was jailed because he fought for socialism.