Henri Krasucki

Henri Krasucki (born September 2, 1924 in Wolomin , Poland , † January 24, 2003 in Paris ) was a French resistance fighter and leading trade union official.

Life

Krasucki was born the son of a textile worker. Just two years later, in 1926, his parents, as active communists and Jews, felt compelled to flee the authoritarian regime of Marshal Piłsudski to France.

Since childhood, the young Henri lived in a Jewish-speaking communist environment. Isaac was one of the leaders of the immigrant Jewish textile workers' union in Paris.

Henri attended the well-known Lycée Voltaire, where he stood out for his excellent academic performance. In 1939 he had to stop attending school for financial reasons. Henri Krasucki was politically active at a very young age. He was first a member of the communist youth. One of his comrades was Pierre Georges, who was to become famous in armed struggle as Colonel Fabien from 1941.

After the Nazi invasion, 16-year-old Henri Krasucki was entrusted with the management of the illegal Jewish Communist youth groups, first in his neighborhood and then throughout the 20th arrondissement. In the summer of 1942, Henri Krasucki took over the leadership of the youth organizations of the Jewish section in Paris and, with his group, offered armed resistance against the German occupation. His brother was killed in an attack on German soldiers.

On January 20, 1943, Krasucki's father was arrested by the French police and interned in Drancy . On February 9, 1943, he was deported to Birkenau and, on arrival, gassed along with 816 others from the transport of a thousand men, women and children.

On March 23, 1943, Henri Krasucki fell into the hands of the Gestapo and, like his family, was deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald after brutal interrogations with no results.

After his liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp, Henri Krasucki returned to Paris and worked as a metal worker, among others for the Renault automobile company . At the same time he organized the communist party youth in the Paris working-class district in which he grew up. From 1949 he was a full-time functionary of the trade union CGT ( Confédération générale du travail ). In 1956 Krasucki became a member of the Central Committee of the KPF ( Parti communiste français ) and since 1961 he was a member of the board of the CGT. In 1964 he joined the Communist Party's Politburo. Here he voted against the entry of the Communist Party into the Mitterrand government in 1981.

Krasucki took on more and more responsibility within the CGT, and finally he was Secretary General of the CGT from 1982 to 1992.

Krasucki remained a member of the Politburo of the PCF until 1996. He died in 2003 and was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery, near the wall where the communards of the Paris Commune of 1871 were shot. On June 23, 2005, near his apartment in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, a square was named after Henri Krasucki.

literature

• Stéphane Courtois, Denis Peschanski, Adam Rayski: L 'Affiche Rouge. Immigrants and Jews in the French Resistance. Berlin 1994