Samuel (Aubrac), Raymond

Raymond Samuel was born on July 31, 1914, in Vesoul, France. He went on to study civil engineering at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées. Though he initially applied for another scholarship in 1937, Aubrac instead received funding from the American Field Service Fellowships for French Universities program to attend college in the United States for a year, where he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and took courses at Harvard.

Following his return to France in 1938 after the completion of his AFS French Fellowship, Raymond Samuel became an engineering officer in the French Army. He was taken as a prisoner of war in June 1940, the same month an armistice was signed between France and Nazi Germany following the latter's victory in the Battle of France. After escaping from prison with the help of his wife, he became involved in the French Resistance and helped begin the underground newspaper of the Resistance group based in Lyon, the Libération-Sud. In June 1943 he was captured by the Gestapo during a meeting of Resistance leaders. Again with the help of his wife, a fellow member of the Resistance, Aubrac escaped and later went to London to assist Charles de Gaulle's government in exile. Aubrac used several pseudonyms during the war, and continued to use one, "Aubrac," as his surname after the war.

[Bio courtesy of AFS Archives, New York]