Jeanine Sunday

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Jeanine Sontag , also Jeannette Sontag ( 1925 in Zurich - August 20, 1944 in Saint-Genis-Laval ) was a Jewish resistance fighter against National Socialism who was caught, tortured and finally murdered by the Gestapo in France.

Life

Sontag was of Polish- Jewish descent and was born into a wealthy family that eventually established itself in Strasbourg . Ingrid Strobl characterizes her as a "sheltered daughter" from a good family "[...], spoiled by her mother, adored by her father". She only became aware that she was Jewish when the Nazi regime occupied Strasbourg. She attended the Lycée , then studied law while her parents fled to the unoccupied zone.

Surprisingly, she made the decision to join the Resistance , due to her bourgeois background at the beginning in the Gaullist resistance force Combat . She dropped out of college and worked in a reconnaissance unit, distributing leaflets and magazines. In the spring of 1944 she contacted the FTP-MOI resistance group Carmagnole . She wanted to fight with the gun and applied with a résumé . Her comrade in arms Henri Krischer , who managed to survive, reported: “She wrote that she was with the Gaullists. Some stupid Stalinists told us that this is a spy who just wanted to find out what we were doing. There was even discussion about shooting them. An Italian comrade finally saved her by saying: She is Jewish. That was the end of the matter. ”Nonetheless, she remained a controversial figure within the Resistance, as she dressed elegantly and liked to discuss experimental literature . Krischer noted - with admiration: "But about a Rimbaud - that didn't happen often." Sontag proved not only to be eloquent, but also to be "an excellent fighter", as she was at the forefront and dragged 25 kilograms Explosives in the backpack. One of their comrades was Léon Landini .

At lunchtime on July 3, 1944, their resistance group broke into the Gambetta garage in Lyon with explosives and combustibles , the workers of which were on their lunch break. The Resistance fighters overlooked the fact that the garage owner was sitting in the office. He called the police, who surrounded the building. The other resistors reached the roof of the neighboring house with their leather shoes over a narrow board, but not Jeanine, who had to be content with rough wooden shoes . Krischer: "Jeannette had wounded her whole feet with these shoes, she had large abscesses everywhere ." She fell, injured her leg and could not get up. She gave her revolver to a comrade and said: "Get rid of it!"

Arrested by the Gestapo , Jeanine Sontag was tortured for seventeen days . Her legs were scalded, her breasts burned with cigarettes, she was sentenced to six days of food deprivation and given only dirty water to drink. She was beaten over and over and still didn't reveal anything.

On August 20, 1944 eleven days before the liberation of the city, Jeanine Sontag was in a quarry by a German firing squad of Gestapo under the command of Klaus Barbie shot .

Honor and commemoration

Sontag received the Resistance medal posthumously . In Strasbourg the library of a grammar school and a square were named after her.

literature

  • Robert Gildea: Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance , Faber 2015, ISBN 978-0-571-28034-6 .
  • Ingrid Strobl : "Never say you go the last way": Women in the armed resistance against fascism and German occupation. Fischer TB 1989, ISBN 3-596-24752-7 , there chapter France , pp. 156-160.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Gildea: Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. Harvard University Press 2015, p. 371.
  2. ↑ Ingrid Strobl : "Never say you're going the last way": Women in the armed resistance against fascism and German occupation. Fischer TB 1989, p. 156.
  3. ↑ Combat on gedenkorte-europa.eu, the homepage of Gedenkorte Europa 1939–1945 , accessed on April 15, 2016
  4. ^ Dictionnaire historique de la Résistance: Résistance intérieure et France libre , Verlag R. Laffont, Paris 2006, p. 117 ff.
  5. ↑ Ingrid Strobl : "Never say you're going the last way": Women in the armed resistance against fascism and German occupation. Fischer TB 1989, p. 157 f.
  6. ↑ Ingrid Strobl : "Never say you're going the last way": Women in the armed resistance against fascism and German occupation. Fischer TB 1989, p. 159.
  7. ↑ Ingrid Strobl : "Never say you're going the last way": Women in the armed resistance against fascism and German occupation. Fischer TB 1989, p. 160.
  8. ↑ Brochure of the Amicale Carmagnole-Liberté in memory of Jeanine Sontag, Bourg-La-Reine, undated as well as an interview by Ingrid Strobl with Dina and Henri Krischer , both quoted. According to Ingrid Strobl: "Never say you are going the last way": Women in the armed resistance against fascism and German occupation. Fischer TB 1989, pp. 156-160.
  9. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The facts behind France's most potent modern myth , The Spectator , August 29, 2015, accessed April 14, 2015
  10. ↑ Memorials Europe: Sontag, Jeanine (1925 Zurich - 1944 Saint-Genis-Laval / Rhône) , accessed on April 14, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Sunday, Jeanine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sunday, Jeannette
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish resistance fighter against National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich
DATE OF DEATH August 20, 1944
Place of death Saint-Genis-Laval