Name Melinee Manouchian | ||
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Born 1913 (age 56) Died 6 December 1989 (aged 56), Paris, France Similar Missak Manouchian, Louis Aragon, Olga Bancic | ||
Mélinée Manouchian (Armenian: Մելինէ Մանուշեան, Mélinée Assadourian, 1913 - 1989) was a French-Armenian resistant, the widow of Missak Manouchian.
Biography
She was born in 1913 in Constantinople. During the Armenian Genocide she lost her parents and was taken, along with her elder sister, to a Protestant orphanage in Smyrne. Then she moved to Corinth, Greece. After 1926 she lived in Marseilles, France, where she learned Armenian and studied accounting. She met her future husband Missak Manouchian in 1934. In 1935 she became secretary of the Armenian Relief Committee. She was in close contact with Charles Aznavour's family. According to Aida Aznavour, the Manouchians "during the long years — and what years! — played an outstanding role in the life of our family". During the French Resistance she became a heroic companion to her husband. She "posed incognito at the scene of a guerilla attack to observe carefully the movements of each actor and note the results of the operation and the reaction of the public". From the early 1940s she regularly made, copied and distributed forbidden anti-fascist literature. When Missak was arrested for the first time, she asked Micha Aznavourian to take her to the camp at Compiègne on his bicycle. She succeeded in passing some food to her husband (the prisoner No351) and even visited him for a second.
After the last arrest of Missak, she was sentenced to death in absentia, but was hidden and saved by the Aznavourians. After World War II she lived and worked in Yerevan, then in the 1960s she returned to Paris. In 1954 she wrote her memoirs about Missak, which were made into a film in 1985. Manouchian implied strongly that the individuals who betrayed the Manouchian Group could be found in the leadership of the Communist Party of France. She launched a public debate by stating that comrades of the victims had done nothing to prevent their capture and execution.
In 1955, on the occasion of the dedication of a street in the 20th arrondissement of Paris named for the Manouchian group, Louis Aragon wrote a poem, "Strophes pour se souvenir", loosely inspired by the last letter that Missak Manouchian wrote to his wife Mélinée:
After the execution of Missak, Melinee never married again, she never had a child
