From the BBC:
“Yvette Lundy: French Resistance
member who survived Nazi camps dies at 103”
Yvette Lundy, a well-known member
of the French Resistance and a Nazi concentration camp survivor, has died at
the age of 103. Authorities said she died on Sunday in the northern French town
of Epernay. Ms Lundy supplied fake
papers to Jewish families, men fleeing forced labour, and escaped prisoners of
war during the Nazi occupation of France. In 2017, she was made a Grand Officer of the
Legion of Honour, one of the highest civilian decorations in France. She also
inspired a character in the 2009 French film Korkoro, which follows a Gypsy
family under threat from the Nazis. Ms
Lundy was remembered on Sunday for her work as a member of a resistance network
known as the Possum Escape Line. Starting
in 1940, she supplied fake papers to people who were then hidden at her
brother's farm. She was arrested in June 1944, when she was 28, and taken to
the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany. Ms Lundy spoke frankly about the
dehumanisation she suffered there from the outset, when she was forced to strip
in front of SS officers. "The body is naked and the brain is suddenly in
tatters. You're like a hole, a hole full of emptiness, and if you look around
it's more emptiness," she said. The former school teacher was later
transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp, which was liberated in April
1945. She remained silent about her
experiences for almost 15 years. But in 1959, Ms Lundy began sharing her
testimony with French and German students, promoting a message of
reconciliation. "Still today, I think of the camp at one point each day...
often at night before I fall asleep," she told AFP news agency in 2017. Mayor
of Epernay Franck Leroy paid tribute to Ms Lundy on social media on Sunday,
calling her "an example for all of us." She "represented the
honour of France during the darkest hours of our history," he wrote. Eric
Girardin, a deputy in the French National Assembly, tweeted that he
"learned with sadness of the passing of Yvette Lundy, great lady of the
Resistance."
^ Another of the Greatest
Generation has passed. Ms. Lundy not only worked in the French Resistance to get the Germans out
of France, but she also survived two concentration camps. I have seen “Korkoro”
and never knew a character was based on her – until now. ^
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