Transcript
Narrator Thus reads one of the last entries in Agent Maurice Pertschuk’s personal file at the British Secret Service. When these words were written, he had been dead nine months, murdered by the SS at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Maurice signed up for service in the British Army in 1940 because he wanted to fight the Germans. He came from a Russian-Jewish family that had lived for years in France and England. Like his parents and siblings, Maurice was a British citizen.
The British Secret Service recruited him because he spoke French without an accent. He became a member of the new Special Operations Executive, whose agents operated behind enemy lines and organized resistance activities against the German occupying forces.
After training in England for several months, he was taken to southern France by boat in April 1942. His task was to build a new resistance network in the Toulouse area.
The young agent whose code name was “Eugène” was very successful. In a short time he recruited many French men and women in factories and public institutions. The group led by Maurice went by the code name of “PRUNUS”.
They were active in the underground for more than a year. They distributed leaflets en masse, committed acts of sabotage and organized weapons deliveries from England. Whilst participating in an operation in an explosives factory, Maurice, along with others, was arrested in April 1943 – an informant had reported them to the Germans. The Gestapo first interned him for several months in the Fresnes prison near Paris. Via the internment and deportation camp in Compiègne, Maurice was deported to Buchenwald in January of 1944.
At the camp the SS registered him under the name of “Martin Perkins” – another alias, which Maurice had given upon arrival. He passed as an English student.
His fellow inmates would later describe him as a quiet, very polite and friendly young man. He worked in the depot and wrote poetry.
But just before the end of the war the Gestapo seem to have discovered his true identity. Fellow inmate Karl Flanner recalls his last moments with Maurice Pertschuk:
Karl Flanner “One day – it was the 29th of March 1945 – his number was called over the loudspeaker. He put on his coat and cap and walked toward the gate. [...] Soon he was leaving the entrance gate, at his side two SS men who escorted him across the muster ground to the crematorium. I waited to see if I [...] would hear the deadly shots – in vain. They hanged him. That very same day his clothes, as was the norm, were brought to the clothing depot to be reused.”
Narrator Maurice Pertschuk only lived to be 23 years old. He received posthumous honours from England and France for his service. A year after the end of the war the poems he wrote in Buchenwald were published with the title: “Leaves of Buchenwald.”
