Annie Kriegel (1926–1995)

Annie Kriegel, née Becker, was a daughter of a Jewish Alsatian family living in the Marais district of Paris. Her brother Jean-Jacques Becker also grew up to become an historian. At age 16, Annie escaped the roundup and mass arrest of Jews in Paris by the French police on July 16, 1942 known as the Vel' d'Hiv. She fled to Grenoble and served in the French Resistance. At the end of World War II, she joined the French Communist Party but changed her views after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and became a scathing and outspoken opponent of communism. She studied at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles and earned a degree in history. She wrote more than a dozen books beginning in 1964, mostly on the history of communism, socialism, and workers' movements. Her 1972 book, The French Communists, was hailed in The New York Times as "the most probing single work on the French Communist Party, and perhaps on any Western Communist party." She wrote a column for Le Figaro and, with Stéphane Courtois, founded the historical review Communisme in 1982. She served on the editorial boards of Commentaire and Mouvement Social. From 1969, she held an appointment as a professor and head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. She married and later divorced Guy Besse, a French philosopher and politician. She later married Arthur Kriegel, brother of Resistance fighter and politician Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont. Her autobiography Ce que j'ai cru comprendre (That I Understand) was published in 1991. Her early life also was described in Susan Zuccotti’s 1993 book, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews.