Paul Ruff

The second of the brothers, Maurice,[3] Inspector of Cultures at the General Government of Algeria, married Reine Sultana Amar,[4] in Sidi Bel Abbès where the eldest of their two children, Paul, was born in 1913.

Paul proposes to give them to her, their relationship does not stop there, and they marry on the eve of his mobilization in 1939 as second lieutenant[6] of an anti-aircraft battery; his unit withdrew in good order in the Fall of France in 1940, after shooting down the first Nazi planes of the war.

Demobilized on 6 August 1940, he manages to meet back his young wife in Limousin, when their first child has already not survived the debacle, and then they rushed south to take the last boat for Algiers, where Ruff's parents still lived and from which he later hoped to return to rejoin the Free French forces.

In the meantime Ruff had joined a resistance group under captain Bouin tasked with demobilising prisoners and escapees and in contact with the young student Jean Athias, the lawyer Maurice Ayoun and Dr André Morali-Daninos.

On the 7th, Amiot, their liaison officer, joined by Dechezelles, warns the other members of the group to go immediately to Algiers where they meet in the next two hours at his house, to learn the date of the landing of the Allied troops.

The Brudno brothers,[14] Laurent Preziosi and three men more will provide them on the evening of the 7th with 200 cartridges of explosives from the construction site of the main sewer collector, quickly mounted in the manner of the Spanish dinamiteros, to make up for the insufficiency of their armament.

There will therefore have been fewer than 400 of them,[19] Jews for the most part, young and more or less well armed, in the various groups that met the day before of 8 November 1942, to take action in this insurrection plotted to temporarily neutralize the Vichy response from Algiers, a decisive aid to the rapid success of the Anglo-American landing in North Africa, in accordance with the secret agreements made with Cherchell, who will succeed beyond their expectations, and who will be qualified later as the "bisector of the war", or by Churchill, as "the end of the beginning".

[20] The success of the action of the resistance fighters ensuring the rapid victory of the Allied landings in North Africa against the civil and military powers in Algiers, then opens for these supporters of a rallying to De Gaulle, contrary to their expectations, a period of proscription, imprisonment and exclusion, because although under the tutelage of the Americans, the French High Commission in Africa, the new French civil and military power in place in Algiers directed by Darlan, maintains in its functions the greater part of the Vichy administration, of its leaders and their ideology.

After the abandonment of legal proceedings, following the armed intervention in court of a military detachment of the Allied forces alerted by the insistent requests of Annie Ruff,[23] Florence Atlan,[24] Myriam Dechezelles and other wives of resistance fighters, they were all released on the spot.

The High Commission of France in Africa, chaired by Admiral Darlan before becoming the French Civil and Military Command-in-Chief under the authority of General Giraud,[26] enacts several further regulatory provisions[27][28] successive discriminations in the recruitment of the French army, from 16 November 1942 to 15 March 1943, to continue to exclude active and reserve military Jews and Freemasons, by assigning them to "pioneer companies" in labor camps[29] to the very harsh living conditions, in Chéraga, and in southern Algeria, (in Laghouat for the Aboulker or in El Meridj for Émile Atlan), or by sending them to the colonial troops, "so that they cannot take advantage en bloc thereafter the title of veterans, and not to prejudge their future status".

Promoted on 3 March 1944 by the French National Liberation Committee (Gaullist), temporary lieutenant, he embarked with his unit on 6 October 1944 from Mers el-Kébir for Marseille, went back to participate with the African Army in the Battle of Belfort from 16 to 27 November 1944, then on the Alsace Front until 14 December 1944.

In the meantime he will write with Maurice Monge, ensembles et nombres[31] for the final classes in the mathematics section, and the formalization of the relationship of pre-order[32] in an accessible educational sheet, familiarizing teachers and students with set theory, actively contributing to the reform of teaching known as "New Math".

He significantly contributed in the elaboration of reflections as author or participant in the writing of feature articles, both in the majority and in the opposition before retiring from the national trade union scene in 1969, hard hit by the accidental disappearance of their only daughter Michèle, in 1965 after passing the tests of mathematics certification of aptitude as second degree's professor.

Retired, he will however continue to animate the introduction to computers and the game of bridge at the Club of retirees of the Mutuelle générale de l'Éducation nationale, whose Annie Ruff runs the Medical Consultation Center in Paris.

With other left-wing intellectuals driven by socialist ideals committed to freedom of thought and speech, to the dissemination of knowledge, to humanism, to the active rejection of oppression and segregation such as fascism, imperialism, totalitarianism, racism and colonialism, he is open to internationalism and various revolutionary, self-managing or libertarian attempts, and has long been detached from orthodox communism and the PCF.

In the context of the Soviet intervention in Budapest and the Franco-British intervention in Suez in 1956 (he was opposed to both), he was one of the founders of Clado (Liaison and Action Committee for Workers' Democracy[34]) an open forum for trade union issues and workers' struggles, bringing together militant trade unionists and policies against imperialisms and bureaucracies, and respecting the political nuances of its members in opposition to the unitary and fixed leaderships of the P.C.F and the C.G.T., and where Dechezelles is also found, and for which he will propose ' 'La Commune' as the title of the newspaper (seven issues, between April 1957 and March 1958; he will also organize public meetings) and those of the magazine Arguments.

He participated from 1955 to 1957, in the first office (with Pierre Lambert, Daniel Guérin, Yves Dechezelles, Laurent Schwartz, Madeleine Kahn, Elie Boisselier, Jean Cassou, Alexandre Hébert, Louis Houdeville, Yvonne Issartel, Guy Marty, Marceau Pivert, Daniel Renard, Robert Chéramy, Jean Rous, Geneviève Serreau, Marcel Valière) of the Committee for the release of Messali Hadj, a detained Algerian historic nationalist leader.