Yvette Lundy, French Resistance Heroine Dies, Aged 103
Last edited Mon Nov 4, 2019, 12:37 PM - Edit history (2)
Source: The Guardian
Schoolteacher helped Jewish people hide and survived Nazi concentration camps. Yvette Lundy, a heroine of the French resistance who survived detention in German concentration camps, has died aged 103.
The schoolteacher supplied fake papers to Jewish people and others being rounded up by the Gestapo and sent them to hide at her older brother Georges' farm. She and her brother were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where Georges died. Lundy spent most of the rest of her life relating the horrors of Nazi Germany to schoolchildren and was made a grand officer of the Legion d'honneur in 2017.
Lundy, the youngest of seven brothers and sisters, was working as a teacher in a village near Epernay, where she also served as secretary to the mayor, when France was occupied. As a member of the local resistance network, codenamed Possum, she drew up false papers for Jews, escaped prisoners of war, Free French fighters parachuted into the region and those being sent to Germany as forced labourers. Lundy later described what she did as "honest trickery".
In June 1944, aged 28, the Gestapo arrested her while she was teaching a class. Lundy was interrogated and deported the next month. After being sent to a concentration camp in south-west Germany, she was then moved to Ravensbrck, 50 miles (80km) north of Berlin, as prisoner number 47,360, one of 130,000 women and children held at the camp...
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/04/yvette-lundy-french-resistance-heroine-dies-aged-103
Lundy later wrote of Ravensbruck, "It is another world: starving beings with emaciated bodies, hollow eyes, shaven heads, drag themselves along in rags. In a few days, we will look like them..." A few months later she was transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp. Berthe, her sister was also imprisoned in Germany and her brother Lucien was held at Auschwitz; both survived the war. Georges died at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945.
After the war and back in France Lundy was too "disorientated" to speak about the experiences, but in 1959 she began touring schools to tell to the horrors of the camps. Her book, Le Fil de l'Araigne (The Spider's Thread) was published in 2012.
Lundy was regarded as "the grande dame" of the town. On her 100th birthday she was asked what advice had guided her life. She replied, "Always ask: where are we going; with whom; what will we do? Everyone has a duty of responsibility, no matter how young."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/french-resistance-hero-yvette-lundy-who-saved-jews-in-wwii-dies-at-103/
- Yvette Lundy was made a grand officer of the Legion d'honneur in 2017.
Vineyards near Epernay, France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89pernay
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We will need their courage in the coming years. 
Nous vous devons beaucoup.
