Maurice Vanikoff

Origins and early life

Maurice Vanikoff was born at Sebastopol in the Crimea on 1 July 1886 and died on 31 March 1961.

Work and career

Before the First World War he was a songwriter of some standing in Paris under the name Vanino; in 1914 he volunteered for the French army, as thousands of foreign Jews did to defend the country that had taken them in, and came out of the war with the Croix de guerre. He gave the rest of his life to fighting antisemitism, which he did by documenting it: he was president of the federation of Jewish ex-servicemen's associations, founded the paper Le Volontaire juif, and took part in 1937 in creating the review Races et Racisme, which recorded antisemitic acts and statements as they occurred, in the belief that a written record would one day be needed.

It was. When the Germans invaded in 1940 he reached Casablanca and worked there in the resistance, helping refugees leave for the United States and South America by the Casablanca route; he then joined the provisional government in Algiers under Jacques Soustelle and directed a centre for the documentation of war crimes. After the war he helped found the Amitié judéo-chrétienne de France, and he opposed the campaigns to rehabilitate Pétain and Céline.