Ivan Slama was born in Tunis on April 17, 1913. He studied medicine in Paris in the 1930s before and during the period of the Popular Front. A member of the Communist youth in Tunis, he participated in the student Communist movement in Paris. During the Spanish Civil War, he joined a convoy of food and medical supplies chartered by the newspaper Ce Soir. 

Upon his return to Tunis as a doctor in late 1940, Slama joined the Tunisian Communist Party. During the Vichy period (1940–1942), a house in Khereddine, a northern suburb of Tunis, was rented in his name as a hideout for Velio Spanio, a Communis…