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Heroic People Who Deserve to be Way More Famous

Khalid Elhassan March 31, 2021 36 min

A black GI and captured Germans in WWII. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Georges Blind in his fireman uniform before WWII. Musee de la Resistance

17. The Heroic Antifascist Who Smiled in the Face of Death

Heroic Resistance fighter Georges Blind (1904 – 1944) of Belfort, France, became famous when a photo surfaced of him smiling at a German firing squad. Before WWII, Blind was a fireman and ambulance driver. After the Germans conquered France, he decided to do his part to take on the Nazis. Blind took his first steps towards joining the antifascist fight just a few months into the occupation, when he and others sheltered a statue of Edith Cavell, a WWI heroine executed by the Germans.

Georges Blind smiling in the face of death. Quora

Blind eventually became a resistance courier. He used his ambulance to transport weapons, information, clandestine publications, and fugitives on the run from the Nazis. He was arrested by the Germans on October 14^th, 1944, and jailed. At some point between October 15^th and 23^rd, he was placed before a German firing squad, and somebody took a photo that immortalized him as a symbol of the resistance. In it, Georges Blind can be seen smiling in the face of death, as German rifles are aimed at him.

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.