← Back to the front page

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

Khalid Elhassan August 10, 2020 34 min

17. Marcel Marceau in the Resistance

Marcel Marceau’s father, a kosher butcher, had to hide the family’s Jewish origins when the Nazis invaded in 1940. He fled with his family to central France, but was captured in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz, where he perished. By then, Marcel had moved to Paris with a new name and forged identity papers. Adopting the surname “Marceau”, after a French Revolutionary War general, he joined the resistance.

His underground activities included the rescuing of many Jewish children from German clutches, and smuggling them to safety. His talent for miming – a career to which he had aspired ever since he first saw a Charlie Chaplain movie when he was five years old – came in handy to distract and quiet the children as he smuggled them past German guards and across the border to safety in Switzerland.

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.