Annie Steiner

Biography

Annie Steiner was an Algerian FLN activist born on February 7, 1928, in Hadjout (formerly Marengo), French Algeria, and died on April 21, 2021. She became involved in the Social Centers and became a member of Yacef Saâdi's "bomb network." Arrested on October 15, 1956, she was sentenced in March 1957 by the Armed Forces Tribunal in Algiers to five years' imprisonment for aiding the FLN. She was then incarcerated in Barberousse Prison before being released in 1961. Born in 1928, she was Algerian of French descent, the daughter of pieds-noirs. Graduating in 1949, she worked in the Algerian Social Centers, created by Germaine Tillion, where their mission was to provide medical assistance and literacy training. It was during this period that she and her colleagues encountered the plight of the Algerians. She came into contact with FLN activists. She explains: "I wasn't active in any party, and the Algerians probably found my decision surprising. They may have investigated me and accepted me shortly after. They asked me, 'How far are you willing to work for the FLN?' I replied, 'I'm totally committed.'" Annie Fiorio-Steiner thus became a liaison officer for the FLN, transporting letters and baskets: "I was never asked to plant bombs. I carried books on explosives manufacturing, but mostly I carried letters that enabled agreements between the FLN and the PCA (Algerian Communist Party)." "I was able to do a lot of things because I wasn't registered, but not because I was better than the others." She was arrested in October 1956 at work and detained in Barberousse prison, where FLN activists were incarcerated before their trial. There, she met her "sisters," mujahideen, who accompanied her during her captivity. On February 11, 1957, at dawn, in the courtyard of Barberousse prison where Annie Steiner was incarcerated, three nationalist activists were guillotined: Mohamed Ben Ziane Lakhnèche, known as "Ali Chaflala," Ali Ben Khiar Ouennouri, known as "Little Morocco," and Fernand Iveton, the only European executed during the Algerian War. That same evening, in her cell, Annie Steiner composed the poem "This Morning They Dared, They Dared to Assassinate You." In March 1957, she was sentenced to five years in prison and was imprisoned at Maison-Carrée, where she joined common-law prisoners. Annie Fiorio-Steiner was then sent to France, to prisons in Paris, Rennes, and Pau. In 1961, she was released and went to German-speaking Switzerland, where her husband and two young daughters resided. She returned to Algeria. Upon Algeria's independence, she chose Algerian nationality and has never left her country since. Her commitment to the principles of November 1, 1954, prompted her to revolt again toward the end of her life. Shortly after, she took up a position as director at the General Secretariat of the Government, a position she held for over thirty years. She died in April 2021. She was buried on April 21, 2021, in the Christian section of the El-Alia cemetery in Algiers.