Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
Louis Braille was a French educator and the inventor of a reading and writing system named after him, braille, intended for use by visually impaired people. His system is used worldwide and remains virtually unchanged to this day.
Maxime Weygand was a French military commander in World War I and World War II, as well as a high ranking member of the Vichy regime.
Roy Allen (1918–1991) was an American, born in the north Philadelphia neighborhood of Olney. He was a bomber pilot during World War II, when he was shot down over France and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Maurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory. Halbwachs also contributed to the sociology of knowledge with his La Topographie Legendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte; study of the spatial infrastructure of the New Testament. (1951)
Jorge Semprún Maura was a Spanish writer and politician who lived in France most of his life and wrote primarily in French. From 1953 to 1962, during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Semprún lived clandestinely in Spain working as an organizer for the exiled Communist Party of Spain, but was expelled from the party in 1964. After the death of Franco and the change to a democratic government, he served as Minister of Culture in Spain's socialist government from 1988 to 1991.
Julie or the New Heloise, originally entitled Lettres de Deux Amans, Habitans d'une petite Ville au pied des Alpes, is an epistolary novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published in 1761 by Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam. The novel's subtitle points to the history of Héloïse d'Argenteuil and Peter Abélard, a medieval story of passion and Christian renunciation.
Valentin Haüy was the founder, in 1785, of the first school for the blind, the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. In 1819, Louis Braille entered this school.
Jacques Desoubrie was a double agent who worked for the Gestapo during the German occupation of France and Belgium during World War II. He infiltrated resistance groups, such as the Comet Line, and was responsible for the arrest of several leaders and more than 100 members of organizations. The lines helped Allied airmen who had been shot down or crash-landed to evade German capture and escape occupied Europe. After the war he was tried, convicted, and executed in France.
Mélanie de Salignac (1741-1763) was a blind French musician whose achievements in the face of her disability were mentioned in the accounts of Diderot.
The Organisation de résistance de l'armée, O.R.A. was a French paramilitary resistance organisation during the Second World War. It was created on 31 January 1943, following the November 1942 German invasion of the zone libre as a self-styled apolitical organisation bringing together former French military personnel in pursuit of active resistance against the German occupiers, but rejecting Charles de Gaulle.
Gérard Roussel (1500–1550) was a French cleric, a student of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and later a member, with his former teacher, of the Circle of Meaux around Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux. This group was characterized by evangelical sensibilities, but all the while remaining Catholics, at a time when religious identities were unclear and a matter of dispute, due to the very recent Protestant Reformation. Gérard Roussel, along with Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, was described by the historian Thierry Wanegffelen as being "between two pulpits", that of Rome and that of Geneva where Jean Calvin would settle permanently in 1541, and, more generally, between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Léon Delarbre was a painter, museum curator, and World War II resistance fighter. After a career as a museum conservator and teacher in his hometown of Belfort, he joined the French resistance in 1941. Arrested in 1944, he was held in a series of concentration camps where he sketched scenes from camp life. These drawings have been widely used to illustrate the horrors of camp life.
The Volontaires de la Liberté was a French resistance group founded in May 1941. Consisting of school boys and led by Jacques Lusseyran, the group's activities consisted initially of propaganda; it published a bulletin that agitated against the Nazi occupation and the regime of Vichy France. After the Service du travail obligatoire, the Compulsory Work Service, was installed by the Nazis in February 1943 the group's size increased and it dispersed, in part due to ideological differences, many members joining the larger, militant Défense de la France to engage in armed combat. Others continued under the Volontaires name and aided other resistance organizations by sheltering downed Allied pilots.
The Quinze-Vingts National Ophthalmology Hospital is France's national ophthalmology hospital located in Paris, in the 12th arrondissement. The hospital gave its name to the Quinze-Vingts quarter.
André Rogerie was a member of the French Resistance in World War II and survivor of seven Nazi concentration camps who testified after the war about what he had seen in the camps.
Boris Taslitzky, sometimes Boris Tazlitsky, was a French painter with left-wing sympathies, best known for his figurative depictions of some difficult moments in the history of the twentieth century. His work is considered as representative of Socialist realism in art in France.
Zina Weygand is a French historian and emeritus researcher at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers. She obtained her PhD from University Paris 1 in 1998.
Jacques Bloch was a French resistance fighter.
