Since her association with Leon Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, Sylvia Ageloff has been demonised and vilified, pushed to the margins of history or simply ignored. What has been all too frequently lacking is any sense of respect, sympathy or understanding of her as a human being, a political activist and someone thrust into a situation not of her making. This short essay attempts to set the record straight.
Since her association with Leon Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, Sylvia Ageloff has been demonised and vilified, pushed to the margins of history or simply ignored. What has been all too frequently lacking is any sense of respect, sympathy or understanding of her as a human being, a political activist and someone thrust into a situation not of her making. This short essay attempts to set the record straight.
Son of a worker, a worker himself from the age of 13, Leon Lesoil awakened to a political life during the First World War. Caught up by the wave of patriotism and chauvinism that swept over Belgium after the German invasion, he enlisted in August 1914 in the sincere belief that the war was in defense of Justice, a “war to end all wars.”