Des terroristes à la retraite (Terrorists in Retirement)

In 1971, a film like Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity) compelled France to interrogate its history and set in motion, along with a national debate, a powerful wave of memory. Des terroristes à la retraite (Terrorists in Retirement), a television film by Mosco made for television almost fifteen years after Le Chagrin et la Pitié, pursues in certain respects the approach initiated by Marcel Ophüls — through the use of testimonies inscribed in the present concerning events of the past, through the consideration of the span of time that separates the moment of testimony from that of the evoked events, through the problematic of memory. The television film marks a new stage in the constitution and expression of a Jewish memory of the Occupation. Scheduled, then taken off the schedule, it was broadcast on 2 July 1985 as part of Les Dossiers de l’écran¹, and followed by a stormy debate. Long after that date, it continued to provoke polemics, controversies, and clarifications, but it allows a new gaze to be cast on the tormented history of the period.

Mosco brings back to life a page long forgotten or concealed in the history of the Occupation. He recalls the role played by foreigners in the French Resistance, their spectacular actions in a Paris delivered over to the Germans, the troubling conditions of their arrest. He allows many viewers to discover men and women who, within the framework of the MOI — Main d’Œuvre Immigrée (Immigrant Labor) — organized by the French Communist Party (P.C.F.), fought in the streets of Paris with the courage of despair, before being arrested and then executed along with the head of their group, Missak Manouchian.

Mosco’s approach attaches itself to the history of a few resisters clearly evoked in the first part of the film: “Those who waged armed struggle against the Nazi occupier were not all Jews, not all Communists, and not all foreigners. But we have chosen to recount the story of seven of them, all Jews, whom nothing predestined to arms or to France.” Mosco thus presents himself as the heir of a history and a culture. As such, he accomplishes a work of reparation, aimed at breaking the silence that, at the time, surrounded these combatants — the oblivion that weighs on the dead, but also on the survivors who laid down their arms to return to their sewing machines. Most often, these latter asked for nothing, except to understand why and how so many of their companions could fall into the hands of the Gestapo.

The first sequences of the film are newsreel sequences from the time. They present images of attacks and destruction, accompanied by a commentary that stigmatizes them: “Such are the works of the foreign terrorists, almost all Jews, Armenians, Polish Jews.” We know that these foreign terrorists were shot on 21 February 1944. Nazi propaganda covered the walls of France with those famous red posters whose aim was to cut them off from the population but which made them the symbol of the struggle for the liberation of France and inscribed the resisters of the Manouchian group in history and in legend. We also know the dramatic impact of these posters on passersby, their trace in memories.

While the voice of Léo Ferré resounds, singing L’Affiche Rouge (The Red Poster), on screen a group of people bearing flags and wreaths of flowers makes its way toward the plot of the foreign resisters in the cemetery at the Porte d’Ivry, where a commemoration ceremony will unfold, in a desolate and wintry landscape. In the sonic background, the roll call of the dead, the reading of a list of names, each followed by the mention Mort pour la France… (Died for France…). Names of immigrants, names of foreigners, gradually passed over in silence, pushed to the margins of History, for, as Aragon says with a poetic but astonishing cynicism: “because your names are hard to pronounce”². Oblivion, silence, which justifies that terrible reflection of Mélinée Manouchian at the end of the film: “There are days when I cannot help thinking that perhaps, if the Nazis had not made that Red Poster, no one would have spoken of Manouchian, of Boczov, of Rayman, of Alfonso. They would have been buried and forgotten.”

Mosco bears witness to a history, to a struggle that is over but also to an unappeased mourning, which explains the construction of the film. The point of departure for the evocation takes place in a cemetery, covered in snow — a metaphor for death and oblivion, further reinforced by the shift of the image into black and white — which comes to recall the collective mourning within which the memory and actions of these combatants are inscribed. The end of the film returns to the pain of old militants who draw up the list, not of their exploits, but of those they lost, killed by the Germans. I tremble at it, says Charles Mitsfiker, his face hidden in his hands; I tremble at it, what the Germans did, says the old man, weeping, forty years later. It is the last image of the film.

A sociological and cultural evocation

In an active attitude, which reflects a little of what they were, these former combatants — now men of a certain age, struggling against the icy wind of the cemetery — present themselves, looking straight into the camera. Each of them evokes his roots, his family, and the reasons that provoked his emigration to France: antisemitism, persecution on account of a Communist commitment, destitution. On screen, the naive and nostalgic paintings of Ilex Beller³ represent traditional Jewish life in Poland: a village half-dreamed, a pious woman lighting candles…

A whole sociological and cultural hinterland is thus drawn. The men interviewed come from Poland; they are the representatives of that yiddishkeit destroyed during the war, of the impetus that had carried the Jewish masses of Central Europe toward Communism, of the commitment that had shaped the life of thousands of militants. They are artisans, tailors, furriers. Jacques Farber, who is retired, busies himself throughout the interview with household tasks, stirring (without much conviction) a spoon in a saucepan, drying the dishes — perhaps to signify the modesty of his social condition, the refusal of a heroic status. The other interviews take place most often in the workshops, at the places of work: one sews, tacks, hems buttonholes; another draws on a piece of cloth, with a tailor’s chalk, the exact location of the building he was to blow up; another still presses the pedal of his sewing machine to set the rhythm of his account.

The machine — Mosco knows how to bring out its essential role, what it represents in the domain of the economy and of the imagination. Charles Mitsfiker recounts the troubles he had in Poland. He recounts that everything was taken from him, then that they wanted to take his machine too, and that he then cried out: “My machine, you don’t touch! My death yes, my machine no!” Charles Mitsfiker and Jacques Farber speak with a very strong Yiddish accent. This language “attached to a sewing machine,” in the expression of Guy Konopnicki⁴, is their mother tongue. Others, like Jean Lamberger, Raymond Kojizski, or Simon, the brother of Marcel Rayman, speak a French with popular intonations that marks their belonging to the working class and their rootedness in working-class neighborhoods. Others still, like Maurice Holban, speak with a strong Romanian accent.

And it is perhaps one of the great strengths and great sources of emotion of Mosco’s film to have made these accents heard — with respect, with emotion — restoring to them their historical, cultural, social dimension. The image of the Jew that appeared on screen from the 1970s onward was that of an assimilated Jew, whose identity remained difficult to grasp. One may think of Monsieur Klein (Mr. Klein) by Losey, of the mother of the main protagonist in Les Violons du bal (The Violins of the Ball) by Michel Drach, of the role played by Michel Piccoli in Lacombe Lucien by Louis Malle. This corresponds to a reality that was that of the French Israélites, but also to a choice banking on the spectator’s possibilities of identification. In this sense, Mosco’s film introduces an important rupture at the level of representation and of identity affirmation. It also induces this observation: there are several Jewish memories of the war.

A historical backdrop

In the historical background is described the paralyzing effect of the German-Soviet pact on these Jewish and Communist militants — disciplined but torn, for, according to the formula of Adam Rayski, one of the witnesses filmed, the pact kept them far from a war that was their own. At the declaration of war, many of them enlisted in the regiments of foreign volunteers. On screen, a beautiful still photograph showing a queue of volunteers outside a barracks, which illustrates many trajectories — to which literature also bears witness: Doino Faber in the trilogy of Manès Sperber, Ernie Lévy in Le Dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just), Isy Perec, the father of Georges Perec, all stood in line to enlist. After the defeat, these volunteers, like their fictional doubles, would be confronted with a policy summed up in the film in a single sentence: “The foreign Jews had fought for France; they did not suspect that, with the entry of the German troops, a certain France would henceforth fight relentlessly against them.” With the rupture of the German-Soviet pact, the armed struggle against the occupier could begin for them.

There is always a relation between a style and a subject matter. Ophüls had filmed a number of witnesses who, during the Occupation, had done nothing. One may think of the pharmacist of Clermont-Ferrand, Verdier, posed in the middle of his living room with all his children and evoking his impotence. Contrary to the relatively static choices⁵ of Ophüls, Mosco’s mobile camera accompanies the witnesses to the spot where they carried out the attacks, captures them in movement within an urban space.

The viewer is invited on a circuit through the capital, where there resound names of places made famous for having been the sites of attacks or acts of sabotage, and whose notoriety produces an effect of contrast with the anonymity of these “terrorists” in retirement. Thus two old gentlemen retrace before our eyes the route they took as adolescents to place a bomb in a trash can, on the path of German troops; they light the fuse, or repeat the gesture of passing their hands through the bars of a garage, handle a weapon… Another witness makes a bomb in front of the camera, explaining that it is, after all, very simple. Nothing triumphalist in these testimonies; these combatants recount how they made the difficult apprenticeship of violence. One reveals himself incapable of killing a German with a hammer because, he says, he is not a murderer. The other cannot fire on his first target and, forty years later, repeats vehemently: he had done nothing to me! Nothing grandiose or heroic in their testimonies, and yet the tableau of their actions is impressive: more than a hundred attacks, ambushes of patrols, derailments, executions — and that laconic phrase that recurs in the mouths of some of them: “During the last period, there was only us in Paris.”

The last part of the film concerns, properly speaking, the fall of the Manouchian group. It is the part that provoked the most polemics; it is also the one whose hypotheses appear the most contestable. What appears scarcely contestable, on the other hand, is the bitterness of those who were used by their commands and then forgotten, erased, whose names were wiped from History⁶. For they were obliterated by two memories, the official memory and the Communist memory, both of which needed to use this past for political ends.

Mosco’s film appears as an important stage in a labor on the memory of the Occupation in France. It presents images of foreign Jews, respecting their accent and their difference, in the will to give an account of the universe from which they issued — both their lost universe in Poland and their mental universe as Communist militants. It proposes a new approach to the history of the period, for it does not attach itself solely to what was done to the Jews of France but to what the Jews did in France during the Occupation.

The debates and the stir provoked by the film constitute one more proof of the power of the image to question, to actualize, to disseminate. But above all they bring to light the effect produced by the filmed personal testimony, whose impact reveals itself progressively more powerful and more durable than the projection of the archival document. Des terroristes à la retraite proves the involvement of heir-filmmakers who, calling into question the illusion of perfect objectivity associated with the documentary, used their talent and the resources of their art to interrogate an era and contest a certain vision of history. It participates in the process of legitimizing a memory — the Jewish memory of the war — for, projected before an undifferentiated public of viewers and television spectators, it allowed a minority memory to integrate itself into the national memory.

Notes