Béatrice Slama (née Saada) was born in Tunis in 1923 to a wealthy Livornese family from the southern Tunisian town of Gabès. After earning her high school diploma from Lycée Armand Fallières in Tunis in 1941, she joined the Communist Party to fight Nazism and the German occupation of Tunisia. After the war, she was one of the founders of the Union of Young Women in Tunisia, a feminist organization with ties to the Communist Party. She led the Union of Young Women from 1944 to 1948. In an article entitled “La Déchirure,” she proudly described her experiences as a Communist during the w…