Transcript
Narrator In the summer of 1940, German troops occupied France. Eighteen-year-old Floréal Barrier was working at the time as typesetter in a printing house. Having grown up in a working-class family, he was active in the trade union and was a member of the youth organization of the Communist Party.
Life in France changed under German occupation. Freedom was curtailed by bans and curfews and food was rationed. Floréal and his friends were unwilling to accept that.
Floréal Barrier At the time we didn’t know the word “résistance“. But pretty soon [I] got together with a group of young comrades. Because I worked in the printing trade, I produced leaflets – sometimes I even wrote them by hand. Our goal was to improve living conditions for the French population [...] On the leaflets we wrote, “Demand milk, demand sugar, demand chocolate for your children. Demand meat so that you may live.”
Narrator It was not long before the police began searching for the creators of these leaflets. To avoid arrest Floréal Barrier went to Paris. But in February of 1943, he found himself in danger there as well.
Floréal Barrier Many raids took place that month. They were looking for young people around 20 years of age who were to be sent to Germany to do forced labour, to work in the so-called Service du Travail Obligatoire. Of course that’s not what I wanted to do, and so I left Paris.
I tried to get to North Africa via the Pyrenees and the Spanish border so as to fight with the Allies there for a “Free France”. But I was arrested at the Spanish border.
Narrator At first he was interned at the prisons in Bayonne and Bordeaux. Then, through the central French internment and deportation camp in Compiègne, Floréal Barrier was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of more than 900 men in September 1943. Like all new inmates, he first had to work in the quarry. Later he was moved to a construction detachment in the Gustloffwerk, the new arms factory next to the camp.
As a Communist, he found ties at the Buchenwald camp to the illegal resistance organization for inmates. He participated in acts of sabotage at the Gustloffwerk factory and in the last months before liberation he was put to work in the so-called camp protection.
Floréal Barrier Camp protection was officially responsible for ensuring discipline in the camp, but it also spied on the SS. It was to guarantee the internal security of the camp and to attempt to avoid incidents of any sort.
Narrator As a member of the secret French resistance group “Brigade d’Action Libératrice”, Barrier lived to see the liberation of the camp. He was among the first armed inmates to leave the camp on the 11th of April to scout out the area and disarm SS officers.
Yet his internment of several years left its marks. Following liberation he first went to a sanitarium in the Black Forest for convalescence. It was only in 1946 that he returned to France. There, he started a family and began working again as a typesetter, which he did until retirement.
Floréal Barrier kept up contact with his former fellow inmates, and got involved early in international associations of former inmates. Until his death he was active in the International Committee of Buchenwald-Dora and Subcamps and in the Inmates’ Advisory Board at the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.
