After the outbreak of war, Maurice Pertschuk volunteered for the British military. He came from a Russian-Jewish family that had lived in France for a long time. Because he spoke French, the secret service recruited him for a special unit. In that capacity he was sent to France in 1942. Despite his young age, he succeeded in setting up a resistance network in Toulouse. He was betrayed, and in early 1944 deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. There he was taken for a British student, and managed to keep his real name and past a secret for more than a year. It was not until shortly before the camp’s liberation that the SS discovered the true identity of the twenty-three-year-old agent and murdered him in the crematorium. The poems he had written in the camp were published posthumously in 1946.
