ABSTRACT
The first two epigraphs chosen to introduce this book refer to the Frenchbased Manouchian Group. The first one was written on a famous Nazi poster, referred to as L’Affiche Rouge (Red Poster), of which fifteen thousand copies were plastered on the walls of French cities in February 1944. The second is a fragment of a poem by Louis Aragon dedicated to them in which he claims their ‘foreignness’ in order to make them part of a human ‘brotherhood’. Although from different standpoints, both use the same parameters to either distance French people from their putative ‘liberators’ or to vindicate them, and these parameters have been determinant in the remembrance of the group. The three categories that make up the poster’s ‘terrorists’– communist (or Bolshevik), alien (or non-patriotic) and criminal – represent what the Nazis believed to be the main threat to the German master race and which they saw embodied in one single category: the Jew. Often labelled as partisans, or potential partisans, or carriers of some sort of partisan gene, Jews were seen in terms of pathology and their murder as a form of purge or purification. The dimensions embedded in these social, political, medical and cultural categories have meant that, even while it was taking place, the murder of European Jews has been a site of multiple and often contested meanings.
