Resistance heroine helped Jews, Allied flyers

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 Ravensbruck and later transferred to Buchenwald, then to a slave labour camp.

For 15 years after she could not bring herself to speak of 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, Yvette Lundy was born on April 22, 1916 at Oger, near Reims. In 1938 she began working as a teacher. When the Germans invaded in May 1940 she fled the area, but returned after two months and resumed teaching.

She also worked parttime 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 Gypsies, those who were fleeing the Germans’ forced labour program, 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 and provide them with false identity documents, before moving them on to safe houses.

Lundy joined the Possum Escape Line. She assisted the Communist Marcel Nautre, and other Possum operatives, in avoiding detection, and sheltered Free French fighters. It’s estimated about 60-70 airmen passed through, or were given shelter.

At the end of December 1943, however, Lafleur was surprised by the Germans while transmitting messages to London. He escaped, but shortly afterwards Potier was arrested and tortured.

More arrests followed. Lundy was arrested in June 1944 and interrogated. Eventually, she was transferred to Buchenwald and assigned to a Kommando slave labour unit near Weimar, from which she was liberated 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, two of whom survived.

Yvette Lundy returned to teaching, and began talking about her experiences. In 2011 she published a memoir, Le Fil de l’araignée, and in 2017 was made a Grand Officer of the Legion d’honneur.