The essential was not to give in. When you resisted, you were already a victor. You had already won.
— Madeleine Riffaud
Yves Bordenave, writing in Le Monde »
Madeleine Riffaud was 18 in 1942. Involved in the Resistance as part of a Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) group founded by communists, her alias was Rainer. Riffaud died on the morning of Wednesday, November 6, in her Paris apartment, aged 100, Le Monde learned from her entourage, confirming a report in L’Humanité. Before becoming a journalist, a war correspondent in Vietnam and Algeria and a renowned poet, she was an emblematic figure of the resistance to the Nazi occupiers.
Sam Roberts, writing in The New York Times »
She was propelled into the anti-Nazi guerrilla underground in November 1940 by a literal kick in the backside from a German officer. He sent her packing after he saw Nazi soldiers taunting her at a railway station as she was accompanying her ailing grandfather to visit her father near Amiens, in northern France.
“That moment,” Ms. Riffaud said in a 2006 interview with The Times of London, “decided my whole life.”
“I landed on my face in the gutter,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I was humiliated. My fear turned into anger.”
She decided then and there to join the French Resistance.
“I remember saying to myself, ‘I don’t know who they are or where they are, but I’ll find the people who are fighting this, and I’ll join them.’ ”
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Last Updated on December 2, 2024