Des terroristes à la retraite (Terrorists in retirement) is a 1985 French documentary film about the FTP-MOI, a sub-group of the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) organization, a component of the French Resistance during the German military administration in occupied France during World War II. It was written and directed by Mosco Boucault.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 and provoked a heated controversy in France which resulted in the film not being broadcast on French television until 1985. The controversy was primarily caused by the film’s thesis that the capture and execution by the Gestapo of members of the FTP-MOIs Manouchian group (groupe Manouchian), including the group's leader Missak Manouchian, was facilitated by the leadership of the French Communist Party.
Background Boucault was born as Moshe Levy into a Jewish family in Bulgaria in 1951. In 1956 his family made the aliyah (Hebrew for "ascent") by immigrating to Israel. Following the death of his father in 1957, his mother moved the family to France, where he grew up and changed his name to the more French-sounding Mosco Boucault. As a teenager, he felt a profound identity crisis feeling not quite entirely either French or Jewish, and became obsessed with the story of the FTP-MOI resistance group as a way to bridge his two identities.
The PCF (Parti communiste français-French Communist Party) had maintained a trade union for immigrants called the MOI (Main-d'œuvre immigrée). In April 1942, a resistance group called the FTP-MOI (Francs-tireurs et partisans – main-d'œuvre immigrée) was founded, led by the Romanian Jewish immigrant Baruch Bruhman, better known by his alias Boris Holban. The FTP-MOI was made up of immigrants in general, but in some of its detachments such as its first battalion and second battalion about 90% of people serving in those units were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. For the young Jewish men and women serving in the FTP-MOI, the Final Solution gave a desperation to their efforts, as not to go underground and resist would mean their extermination. The British historian Gawin Bowd wrote that the FTP-MOI: "...turned out to be the most courageous and deadly arm of the Communist resistance in the Paris area: as foreigners, and often Jews, they had little to lose in occupied France, while a long experience of clandestine activity and civil war had made them well-prepared."
However, not all who served in the FTP-MOI were Jewish. The second military commander of the FTP-MOI, Missak Manouchian, was an Armenian refugee from the Ottoman Empire who fled to France after surviving the Armenian genocide. Italian Communist refugees and Spanish Communist refugees were also well represented in the FTP-MOI. However, because of the disproportionate number of Polish, Hungarian and Romanian Jews serving in its ranks, the FTP-MOI is often considered to be the premier Jewish resistance group in France. The FTP-MOI was considered to be an elite force within the Communist resistance that was always assigned the most dangerous missions. At the time of the final mass arrests, the French police discovered that the FTP-MOI had members from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Armenia.
Though there was a tendency in France to ignore non-French contributions to the Resistance, the Affiche Rouge ("Red Poster") that appeared in massive numbers all over France starting on 21 February 1944, after the mass executions of the FTP-MOI members captured in November 1943, ensured the group always had a certain degree of fame in France. The Affiche Rouge appeared as both a poster and a pamphlet bearing the photographs of the executed men together with photographs of the wreckage left by their attacks such as derailed trains on a red background. The caption on the Affiche Rouge read: "Des Libérateurs? La Libération par l'Armée du Crime!" (Liberators? Liberation by the Army of Crime!"). The Affiche Rouge was intended by the German occupation authority to capitalize on fears in France that the victories of the Red Army on the Eastern Front would mean that France would be incorporated into the Soviet Union after the war and to depict the Resistance as the work of foreign-born Jewish Communists. The Affiche Rouge made a point of emphasizing that most of the men pictured were Jewish, and none were French. However, the intention of the Affice Rouge was foiled as ordinary people took to writing under the photographs "mort pour la France" ("died for France"), an expression traditionally used to describe those who were killed fighting for France. As a Jew from Eastern Europe, Boucault felt a strong affinity for the FTP-MOI. The Affiche Rouge was featured both in the film and on its poster. Boucault's mother had survived the occupation in France and had been forced to wear the yellow Star of David badge, inspiring her son with the desire to make a film that would "settle the score". The film was intended to portray Jews during the occupation not as passive victims as generally seen, but rather as active resisters who fought hard to avoid being exterminated.
Production After graduating from the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, Boucault set out to make a fictional film about a young man who discovers his father was executed during the war as a FTP-MOI member and that his family is Jewish, which was hidden by his mother to promote their assimilation into French society. However, the project developed into a documentary instead. With a grant from the Antenne 2 television channel and another grant from the French Ministry of Culture, Boucault contacted a veterans' group L’Union des Engagés Volontaires et Anciens Combattants Juifs and asked if he could interview their members about their wartime experiences. It was agreed that if Bocault was unable to find a distributor to release the film in the cinema theaters, his documentary would instead air on Antenne 2. To assist with the film, the historian Stéphane Courtois worked as a historical consultant. The actress Simone Signoret, who had been cast as the young man's mother, instead served as the film's narrator. The film was shot in 1982 with the intention of having it released in 1983.
Thesis The main thesis of the film is that the downfall of the groupe Manouchian led by the Armenian Communist Missak Manouchian in 1943 was engineered by the French Communist Party who betrayed them to the French police, and then sought to erase the existence of the FTP-MOI from the historical memory after the war. The British historian Gawin Bowd wrote that film presents the thesis that: "...Groupe Manouchian had been sacrificed, perhaps even betrayed, by a Communist leadership that was chauvinistic, even anti-Semitic, and prepared to spill foreign blood to present itself as the most active force in the French Resistance". The film's thesis made it the object of immense controversy both at the time and since.
Synopsis Boucault tells the story of the FTP-MOI via newsreel footage, voice-over narration, interviews with surviving members and reenactments. In France, there are two documentary styles. One associated with the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann in his 1985 documentary Shoah that involved interviewing people with no effort of the filmmaker to add anything extra into the film. The other type associated with the filmmaker Marcel Ophüls in his 1988 documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie involved not only interviews, but also newsreels, music, clips from other films, and the director himself who was arguably the "star" of the film as Ophüls had confrontational meetings as he tracked down various people who knew SS Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie in Europe and Latin America. Lanzmann was a partisan of the purist approach to documentaries as he argued that Ophüls's approach was diluting reality, criticism that Ophüls rejected.
Boucault used a mixture of both approaches. About 85% of the film's eighty-two minutes running time consists of interviews with various former FTP-MOI members. Boucault called allowing people to speak at length the "magic of the documentary" that made it possible for “the witnesses [to] have time to breathe, to exist rather than being used simply as tools, a sentence here and there by way of illustration.” Three of the men interviewed, namely Jacques Farber, Louis Gronowski, and Adam Rayski were leaders of the FTP-MOI. In the film, Boucault tended to be much more sympathetic towards the foot soldiers of the FTP-MOI, presenting the men who planted the bombs and performed the assassinations in a positive light while presenting the leaders of the FTP-MOI in a more negative light.
The other four men interviewed, namely Ilex Beller, Charles Mitzflicker, Jean Lemberger and Raymond Kojitski were all Polish Jews who immigrated illegally to France in the 1930s and who served as FTP-MOI assassins. Beller spoke about having to walk for months via Czechoslovakia, Germany and Belgium to make his way to France. Mitzflicker stole away on a train and had to eat raw eggs to survive the five-day long trip from Warsaw to Paris. Lemberger was the constant victim of corrupt French policemen who knew that he was an illegal immigrant and forced him to pay extortion money to avoid being deported back to Poland. Beller, Mitzflicker, Kojitski and Lemberger were all working as tailors in 1980s France and all four men were still living in poverty, very much on the margins of French society just as they had been 50 years before. Kojitski worked 10 hours everyday as a tailor just to earn the small sum of 75 francs per day. Boucault filmed all four men at work, doing the tiresome work as tailors despite their age, partly to show their marginal status and partly as a metaphor for how all their stories come together just as they weave threads together.
Kojitski in his interview stated “if there were Nazis to rub out right now, I'd do it with pleasure, with no remorse”, saying he felt a "hatred that will never go away" because of his family being exterminated at Auschwitz. Beller, Lemberger and Mitzflicker all joined the FTP-MOI in 1942 and all admitted that they found it psychologically difficult to kill, saying the work of an assassin was not a job that they relished. Kojitski by contrast joined the FTP-MOI in 1944 to avenge his family, excelled at being an assassin as he stated he felt “great pleasure if some Germans were killed", and quickly rose up to become the commander of a FTP-MOI assassination squad. As Kojitski lists all of his family members who were exterminated, the camera focuses in on the steel needle of his sewing machine stabbing the cloth, which serves as a metaphor for his rage. Lemberger in his interview described in harrowing detail being arrested and tortured by the French police before finally being deported to Auschwitz. In his interview, Mitzflicker broke down in tears while working on his sewing machine, recalling that his mother, brother and sister were all exterminated at Auschwitz, saying: "I didn't do enough; I still shake, I didn't do enough." Unlike Kojitski, Mitzflicker was willing to forgive the Germans, saying "It wasn't the German people who did this to me; it was the Nazis."