BELGIAN RESISTANCE MEMBER WHO RESCUED 135 DOWNED ALLIED AIRMEN

•1920-2022

Monique Hanotte, who as a Belgian teenager risked her life to help escort 135 Allied airmen out of Germanoccupied France and Belgium during World War II, died Feb. 19 in the Belgian city of Nivelles. She was 101.

Her death, of undisclosed causes, was announced by municipal authorities in Nivelles.

The unarmed Belgian resistance — two-thirds of them women of all ages — hid, clothed, fed and created false documents for downed airmen, and then guided more than 800 of them on a long, dangerous trail through France, over the rugged Pyrenees to Spain, and finally into the British territory of Gibraltar, from which they would be flown to England.

Hanotte was one of the last handful of surviving members of the Belgian “Comet Line,” a resistance network dedicated to saving Allied airmen from capture, torture and likely execution by the Nazis.

The network's motto was “Pugna Quin Percutias” (fight without arms), as it never undertook armed or violent attacks during the German occupation, unlike the neighboring French resistance. Around 160 members of the network, including many women, were captured by the Gestapo, often tortured, executed or sent to German concentration or extermination camps.

Hanotte's resistance “career” began in May 1940, when she was 19, after two ragged British army officers showed up at the Hanotte family's small hotel in the Belgian village of Rumes, just over a mile from the French border, soon after Hitler's forces had invaded Belgium on their way to France.

The men had become separated from their units and were trying to get to the French port of Dunkirk to join the British mass evacuation in the face of the German onslaught. The United States had not yet entered the war.

Hanotte — then known by her birth name, Henriette — and her younger brother, Georges, helped feed and clothe the officers and removed anything easily identifiable as English (such as shirt labels). The Hanotte matriarch, Georgette, then dressed the men as coal merchants and guided them across the border into the hands of the local French maquis (resistance), who would get the officers to Dunkirk.

Soon after the massive Dunkirk evacuation that May and June, another British officer knocked at the Hanottes' door. He was an agent of Britain's military intelligence section MI9, set up to rescue Allied airmen shot down over Germany or German-occupied France or Belgium.

Having heard of the family's anti-nazi activity, he asked her parents if he could enlist Henriette in the endeavor as part of the Comet Line. She and her parents did not hesitate, and so began her new life with the code name Monique, a name she would retain.

Mostly, she guided Allied airmen around German lines into France, then accompanied them by train to Lille or Paris, where the French resistance would take over and get them to Gibraltar. According to the Times of London, she would buy rail tickets from different booths to ensure they did not have consecutive numbers. "I always had an old loaf of stale bread in my bag," she recalled. "If we were checked, I would say, 'I went to get bread from the country.' It was easier to get through as a woman."

In late 1942, her clandestine family operation was "bursting at the seams," the Times of London quoted her saying. "We didn't know where to put them [the airmen, whom she always referred to in English as 'my boys'] any more, and my mother said to me, 'Hurry up.' There were two of them who were leaving and two who were arriving."

Having grown up, played along and crossed the Belgian-french border as a child and up to the May 1940 German invasion of both countries, Hanotte knew every ditch or secret path through the hedgerows. She also knew the French and Belgian border police and customs officers by name, and they would later advise her of German troops' whereabouts.

The town of Bachy, France, close to her childhood home in Rumes, features a statue showing Hanotte escorting the American airman over the Belgianfrench border.

Henriette Lucie Hanotte was born in Sépeaux, France, Aug. 10, 1920, to a Belgian veteran of WWI and his French wife. They moved to Rumes when Henriette was a baby.