Elisabet Ricol, known as Lise London, was born in Montceau-les-Mines on 15 February 1916 and died in Paris on 31 March 2012. The daughter of Aragonese emigrants from Teruel, at the age of fifteen she was already a member of the French Youth Communists and at eighteen she began to work in the Komintern in Moscow, where she met Artur London, a young communist and intellectual, a Czech of Jewish origin. From that moment on, they shared the ideal of the fight against fascism. Both joined the International Brigades to help Republican Spain.
Later, during World War II, together with her husband Artur (alias Gérard) she was a member of the French resistance until she was arrested in August 1942. Sentenced to death, she was saved from execution because she was pregnant with her first child, although she was sentenced to forced labour for life and was deported by the Germans to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She can be considered a privileged witness to history, as she met Stalin, Tito, La Pasionaria and Ho Chi Minh, among others.
La Mégère de la Rue Daguerre (1995), the first of her two volumes of memoirs, records her life and that of Artur London (author of L’Aveu (1968), the book that revealed the criminal activities of the Stalinist state machinery). The second volume, Le Printemps des Camarades (1996), picks up the period between the defeat of the Republic and the return from the Nazi concentration camps.
Jean Ferrat has dedicated songs to her and Simone Signoret played her in The Confession (1970), a film by Costa Gavras based on the memoirs of Artur London. A film has also been made about her life: El rojo de las cerezas, directed by Emilio Garrido in 2011.