Courier in wartime Paris passed orders and money

Alix d’Unienville, who has died aged 97, served as a courier for the Special Operations Executive and the Free French resistance in wartime Paris.

D’Unienville was regarded by her SOE instructors as an ideal go-between because “she is discreet and inconspicuous — the last person to be suspected.” Operating under the code name “Myrtil” — all the code-names of her group were taken from the plays of Moliere — she survived for three months, flitting from rendezvous to rendezvous passing on orders and money to resistance commanders.

On June 6, 1944, D-Day, elated at having heard moments earlier that the Allies had landed, she rushed to “meet” with another resistance operator, Tristan, at a Metro station. As she waited, two men walked past. When a voice inside her said “Gestapo,” she pushed it to one side.

But when Tristan and another colleague arrived, she barely had time to whisper excitedly, “The Allies have landed?” before a voice behind her demanded that she produce her identity papers.

The two men had returned. They were not from the Gestapo but from the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi intelligence service. They were initially taken to the SD’s headquarters where they were interrogated.

While their captors were undoubtedly brutal, in particular with Tristan, they were less than efficient. All they found on d’Unienville was her cyanide capsule and a Metro ticket. The capsule ought to have told them she had been sent from London but they never questioned about it.

She was taken to Fresnes prison, where she feigned insanity to escape. But this only succeeded in getting her moved to the Gestapo prison, where conditions were even worse. As the Allies closed on Paris, the prisoners were crowded into cattle trucks destined for concentration camps in Germany.

When the train was forced to stop by the Allied bombing of a railway bridge over the Marne, however, the prisoners were forced off the train and made to walk across the road bridge. Then, as they walked into the village of Mery-sur-Marne, the prisoners surged around a drinking fountain.

As the guards struggled to control them, she slipped inside a house. She borrowed some clothes from the woman and walked into the countryside.

She found shelter with another woman in a house where they waited until they were liberated by U.S. troops.

After the war, she was appointed a member of the Order of the British Empire; in France she was appointed to the Legion d’honneur and awarded a Croix de Guerre.