Gilles Perrault

in Léo Matarasso, Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi

In 1967 a violent anti-Semitic campaign began and developed in Poland. Among its victims was Léopold Trepper and his family. Trepper was the former head of the Red Orchestra, a highly effective Soviet intelligence network during World War II. His wife and children were allowed to go into exile. But the Polish authorities, for “state reasons,” kept Trepper in Warsaw and placed him under close police surveillance.
Léo Matarasso was one of the first to take up the fight for the prisoner of Warsaw. It was in his office on the Rue de Tournon that the Committee to Support Léopold Trepper was created. He was our elder brother. His experience and coolness reassured us. His humour comforted us. The brotherly presence of this mentor warmed our hearts. For Léo was a delightful man, which great activists are not always, with a rare charm, attentive to others.
And he was talented. An immense talent. This was evident when he had the prefect director of the DST condemned for defamation, who, in an open letter to Le Monde, had accused Trepper of having collaborated with the Gestapo and betrayed his comrades. This attack, dictated by an unbounded ideological hatred, risked destroying the solidarity movement with Trepper that was developing throughout the world. If the trial had been lost, Trepper would die in Warsaw alone and disgraced. And almost everyone predicted our failure. But Léo, with Daniel Soulez Larivière, won the unwinnable case, and Trepper was able to leave Poland and be reunited with his family.
How can you not admire and love Léo?
Perrault, Gilles
in:

<strong>Léo Matarasso,
Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi
Milano, maggio 2009</strong>