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A Ballerina Who Stabbed an SS Guard With a Stiletto and Other Historic Rebels

Khalid Elhassan August 10, 2020 34 min

27. A French Resistance Heroine

Charlotte Sorkine’s wartime fake identification. The Forward

French resistance member Charlotte Sorkine Noshpitz was born in Paris in 1925 to a Romanian mother and a Belorussian father. One of her grandfathers was an anthropology professor, and Charlotte was raised in an intellectual household. Her home hosted a weekly salon that was often attended by French luminaries of the arts, letters, sciences, and academia.

Her life took a drastic turn for the worse after the Nazis defeated France in 1940. The collaborationist Vichy regime enacted discriminatory laws that revoked the French citizenship of naturalized Jews, and authorized the internship of foreign Jews or the restricted their residence. When out in public, Charlotte and her family had to wear yellow stars of David sewn on their clothes to identify themselves as Jews.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.