Nallit Jean

Nallit, Jean File 5197 In March 1944, Jean Nallit was a twenty-year-old activist in Lyons, in Darius, an underground cell. He was deputy to Pierre Frey, the commander of Darius and of the entire area. This cell, whose members were mostly non-Jews, worked together with the Jewish underground organization, the “Jewish Army” (L’Armée Juive). They forwarded information about search warrants issued by the Gestapo, about arrest warrants against underground members, about the French police’s roundup plans, and the like. The Darius cell is famous for issuing some 30,000 forged documents, of which about 300 were for Jews. No records of the documents were kept because of the danger of disclosure. In 1944, Nallit was in charge of preparing and distributing these documents. As a municipal clerk, he had access to papers and forms, which were essential for his underground work. He had contact with Bernard Grossman, nicknamed “Grand” who was a member of the “Jewish Army” and transferred various documents to him. In late March 1944, Nallit was en route to Grossman with several forged army discharges in his pocket, including one for Grossman, under a false name but with his photograph attached. About fifty meters from Grossman’s house, as Grossman watched, the Gestapo arrested Nallit. Grossman managed to escape and warned the activists endangered by Nallit’s arrest. Although brutally tortured by the Gestapo, Nallit revealed nothing to his interrogators and consequently, no one in the resistance organizations was harmed as a result of his detention. Nallit was deported to Buchenwald that April and returned to France after the war. On April 16, 1992, Yad Vashem recognized Jean Nallit as Righteous Among the Nations.