Stephane Hessel was born in Germany in 1917, emigrated with his Jewish writer father and mother to France in 1924, and fought in the French Army in 1940. After being captured by German forces, he escaped from a prisoner of war camp and joined General Charles de Gaulle's Free French in London. On his clandestine return to organise the Resistance in France, he was caught, arrested, tortured and sent to concentration camps. He escaped death to work after the war on drafting the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose ideals he defends passionately to this day.