Yvette Lundy
French resistance heroine who survived Ravensbrück camp
YVETTE LUNDY, who has died aged 103, was a member of a French Resistance network known as the Possum Escape Line; arrested in June 1944, she was taken to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück and later transferred to Buchenwald, then to a slave labour camp.
For 15 years after the war she could not bring herself to speak about her experiences, but in 1959 she began to tour schools in France and Germany, promoting reconciliation.
The youngest of seven children of a farming family in the champagne-growing region around Épernay, Yvette Lundy was born on April 22 1916 at Oger, near Reims.
In 1938 she began working as a schoolteacher in the nearby village of Gionges. When the Germans invaded in May 1940 she fled the area, but returned after two months and resumed her teaching duties.
She also worked part-time at the town hall, a job that gave her access to official records and helped her to make false papers and fake ration cards for Jewish people and gipsies, those who were fleeing the Germans’ forced labour programme, and escaped prisoners of war, who were hidden by her brother Georges at his farm.
In July 1943, two MI9 agents, Dominique Potier, a Belgian Air Force officer, and Conrad Lafleur, his French-canadian radio operator, were parachuted into Belgium.
There they established a network to help recover Allied airmen shot down in Belgium and France on bombing raids and provide them with false identity documents, before moving them on to safe houses in and around Reims – an area suitable for evacuation by air, using Lysander aircraft.
Yvette Lundy soon joined the Possum Escape Line. She assisted the Communist Marcel Nautré, and other Possum operatives, in avoiding detection by the authorities, and sheltered Free French fighters who had been parachuted in.
It is estimated that some 60-70 airmen passed through, or were given shelter by Possum in the months it was active.
At the end of December 1943, however, Conrad Lafleur was surprised by the Germans while transmitting messages to London. He escaped, but shortly afterwards Dominique
Potier was arrested and tortured.
He took his own life in January 1944, but more arrests followed and the network effectively collapsed. Yvette Lundy was arrested at her school by the Gestapo in June 1944 and interrogated at Châlons-surmarne.
She was transported to Ravensbrück, where she was forced to strip naked in front of SS officers. “I will never forget the screams and cries in the night from the women who no longer had their children,” she told Le Parisien in 2009.
Transferred to Buchenwald, she was assigned to a Kommando slave labour unit near Weimar, from which she was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945.
Of the 70 or so helpers arrested in the French sector of the Possum Line, some 60 were deported, and of those fewer than 30 survived. Three of Yvette’s siblings were also deported. Her sister Berthe and her older brother Lucien (who was sent to Auschwitz) both survived, but her brother Georges died in the Schörzingen concentration camp.
Yvette Lundy returned to teaching, and once she began talking about her experiences there was no stopping her. In 2011 she published a memoir, Le Fil de l’araignée (“The spider’s thread”), written with Laurence Barbarot-boisson, and in 2017 she was made a Grand Officer of the Légion d’honneur.
She also inspired a character in Tony Gatlif ’s 2009 film Korkoro, which depicts the rarely documented subject of the Nazi persecution of the gipsies.
“I think of the camp at one point each day … often at night before I fall asleep,” she told the AFP news agency in 2017.