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Fernand Iveton (or Yveton) was guillotined on this date in 1957, for Algeria. An pied-noir gas worker, Iveton (English Wikipedia entry | French) attempted to bomb the Algerian Gas Company in support of the National Liberation Front, to which he also belonged. Wishing to commit his sabotage sans bloodshed, he timed the bomb to detonate when the plant would be empty … but under close surveillance, he was stopped in the act of setting it on the evening of November 14, 1956. Iveton’s tenderness for his countrymen’s lives was not reciprocated by the military court which, acting with frightful emergency...

“In December 1944,” begins Sim Kessel’s Holocaust memoir, “I was hanged at Auschwitz.” He was twenty-five years old and had been caught attempting to escape. Sim Kessel (called “Sam” in some accounts), a French Jew who boxed professionally, had been at Auschwitz for two years — a staggering period of time where the normal lifespan of a prisoner was at most three months — and had already escaped the gas chambers on two occasions. The first time, he was in the infirmary recuperating from a severe beating and torture at the hands of the SS (one of his fingers had...