Boris Vildé
Boris Vildé (* June 25 . Jul / 8. July 1908 . Greg in Saint Petersburg ; † 23. February 1942 in Mont Valerien ) was a Russian - French ethnologist , linguist and resistance fighter in the French Resistance .
Life
Prewar years
Boris Vilde was born into a Russian Orthodox family. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, he emigrated to Estonia in 1919 with his mother, sister and aunt . The family lived in Tartu , (German and Swedish: Dorpat ), where he graduated from the Russian-language high school in 1926. According to Valmar Adams , as a young man and bohemian who wrote poetry in Russian , Vilde tried to return to the Soviet Union via Lake Peipus , but failed. He studied at the University of Tartu . From 1930 to 1932 he stayed first in Latvia and then in Berlin, Germany. Vilde came to Paris in the summer of 1932 as a specialist in Arctic residents at the Musée de l'Homme and was naturalized to France in 1936.
Resistance movement
Immediately after France was occupied by the Wehrmacht in 1940, he began to recruit members for a resistance movement at his place of work. He later expanded these recruits.
Vildé and the underground network he had established collected information about German positions, for example air defense positions near Strasbourg or submarine bunkers in Saint-Nazaire , which they passed on to London via middlemen . They also worked as escape helpers and published an underground newspaper called Résistance .
Boris Vildé was arrested and taken away by four Gestapo men on March 26, 1941 at around 3 p.m. on Place Pigalle . Eleven months later, on February 23, 1942, Vildé and six other resistance fighters were shot in the fortress of Mont Valérien .
Vildé's diary, which he had kept during his imprisonment, was given to his wife by the Germans.
“There was a time in my life when I was ready to commit suicide out of curiosity about death and what came after it. Now I'm not in such a hurry anymore, because I know that death awaits me. "
literature
- Boris Vildé: Journal et lettres de prison, 1941-1942. Editions Allia, Paris 1997. German edition: Consolation of philosophy. Diary and letters from prison . Ed., Translated and with a foreword by Felix Philipp Ingold , Matthes & Seitz Berlin 2012. ISBN 978-3-88221-598-4
- Cay Rademacher : Paris - the city that doesn't fight back . In: GEO Epoch - The Second World War . Part 1, No. 43 . Gruner & Jahr, 2010, ISBN 978-3-570-19908-4 , ISSN 1861-6097 , p. 74-90 .
- Martin Blumenson : The Vildé Affair. Beginnings of the French Resistance . Houghton Mifflin 1977.
Web links
- A la mémoire de Boris Vildé. borisvilde.narod.ru
Individual evidence
- ↑ Valmar Adams: Tartu poisi tähelend. Looming, 1964, no 8, p. 1203.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Vildé, Boris |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Вильде, Борис (Russian) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Russian-French ethnologist, linguist and resistance fighter in the Resistance |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 8, 1908 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | St. Petersburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 23, 1942 |
| Place of death | Mont Valérien |