French Resistance heroine who survived Ravensbrück
Yvette Lundy 1916-2019
Yvette Lundy, who has died aged 103, was a schoolteacher and a member of the Possum Escape Line – a French Resistance network that helped rescue scores of Allied airmen shot down over Occupied Europe. In 1944, she was arrested and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp; she was later transferred to Buchenwald. For 15 years, she declined to talk about her wartime experience. She was, she said, too “disoriented”. But once she had found her voice, she spent much of the rest of her life touring schools in France and Germany, testifying to the horror of the camps.
The youngest of seven children, she was born into a farming family near Épernay in 1916. By 1940, when the Nazis arrived, she was working as a teacher in a nearby village – but also had a part-time job in the town hall. With access to local records, she started issuing false ration cards and documents to Jews and Gypsies fleeing German forced labour programmes, and escaped PoWs, who were being hidden by her brother Georges at his farm. The Possum Line was established by two MI9 agents who were parachuted into the Ardennes, in Belgium, in 1943. Their mission was to rescue Allied airmen shot down on bombing raids, and spirit them across the border to the area around Reims, which was suitable for airborne evacuations. Lundy provided assistance to the network until it collapsed in 1944 – it sheltered some 60-70 airmen during the time it was active. Arrested by the Gestapo in her own classroom, she was taken to Ravensbrück, the women’s camp north of Berlin, where, like all its inmates, she was made to strip naked in front of SS officers – the first step in a process of dehumanisation. “The body is naked and the brain is suddenly in tatters,” she said, years later. “You’re like a hole, a hole full of emptiness, and if you look around it’s more emptiness.” In 2009, she told Le Parisian: “I will never forget the screams and cries in the night from the women who no longer had their children.” Transferred to Buchenwald, she was assigned to a slave labour unit near Weimar, from which she was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. Three of her siblings were arrested and deported. Two survived, but Georges died in Schörzingen camp. “Still today, I think of the camp at one point each day... often at night before I fall asleep,” Lundy told AFP in 2017.
Touring schools from 1959, she had one piece of advice for the children: “Always ask: Where are we going? With whom? What are we doing? Each and every one of us has a responsibility, regardless of how young we are.” She inspired a character in the French film Korkoro (2009), about a Gypsy family fleeing the Nazis, and on her 100th birthday, she was elevated to the secondhighest level in France’s Légion d’honneur, Grand Officier.