Henri Krasucki  Henri Krasucki (2 September 1924, Wołomin, Poland - 24 January 2003, France) was a French trade-unionist, former secretary general of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) from 1982 to 1992. Henri Krasucki's father, Izaak, a worker and activist, emigrated from Poland with his wife, a textile worker and communist activist, in 1926. During the German occupation, his father was arrested on charges of sabotage on 20 January 1943 and interned at Drancy internment camp, before being deported on 13 February to Birkenau concentration camp where he was gassed at his arrival. During his youth, Henri Krasucki involved himself in cooperative movements, before entering the Renault factory where he began activism as a trade-unionist. Under the Vichy regime, he took part to the FTP-MOI Communist resistance movement composed of immigrants under the pseudonym "Mésange" (Bluetit). His brother was killed during an attack against a formation of the Wehrmacht. On 23 March 1943, Henri was arrested by the Gestapo who also detained his mother and other resistants. Tortured in the Fresnes prison, where he was detained for six months, Henri Krasucki didn't break under interrogation and kept silent. On 23 June 1943 he was deported from Drancy to Jawischowitz, a sub-camp of Auschwitz, and then to Buchenwald. Out of 1,002 Jews, including 160 children under the age of 18, deported from Drancy in the same train as him (n°55), only 86 survived. On 28 April 1945, Henri Krasucki returned to France, "just in time to demonstrate for the 1st of May," as he said humorously. After the Liberation, he became a leader of the French Communist Party (PCF) although his main interest remained trade-unionism. In 1949, he was secretary of the departmental union of the CGT in the Seine, then entered in 1953 the PCF's federal bureau in the Seine. In 1956, he entered the central committee of the PCF, and then in 1961, the confederal bureau of the CGT, before becoming the director of the union's mouthpiece, "La Vie ouvrière". In 1964, he became a member of the political bureau of the PCF, and was for a time one of the candidates of the CGT's leadership in 1967.