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The Last Letter

Condemned to death by firing squad, French resistance fighters put pen to paper. Their dying words can teach us how to live

I picked it up, opening the pages slowly and carefully as if I held in my hands a fragile treasure, like ‘this butterfly wing’ which the 19-year-old Robert Busillet, executed for his role in an intelligence-gathering and sabotage network, bequeathed to his mother ‘ en souvenir de moi ’, to remember him by. In other words, those arrested and imprisoned for, let’s say, writing or distributing illegal tracts and newspapers, protesting in the streets, or even listening to news from forbidden radio sources such as the BBC were, effectively, handed death sentences-in-waiting. His crime, which led to his May date with a Nazi firing squad, was to organise and distribute underground magazines, whose purpose was to rally intellectuals to the anti-fascist cause, and to inject some humanism into news cycles gorged with nationalist and divisive propaganda.

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