“You don’t know what freedom is if you have never lost it.”
This lovely young lady was running a beauty salon in France in 1940. After the German invasion she could have sat tight and carried on with her business and waited to see how things turned out. Instead she risked her life distributing anti German pamphlets and, within months, had become an organiser with the Resistance, helping escaped Allied airmen, reporting German troop movements and supervising improvised landing strips.
In 1944 she was arrested and spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, ending up in Buchenwald. She was scheduled to be put before a firing squad on the very day that US soldiers liberated the camp.
After the war she met and married an Englishman and, a few years later, moved to Britain, settling in Bristol where she spent the rest of her life. This week she died, aged 105, in an old people’s home.
She was interviewed a year ago, still bright as a button, and she wore her medals with pride. They included France’s highest award for bravery, the Legion d’Honneur, the War Cross with palm, the War Cross with purple star, the American Medal of Freedom, the Medal of the Resistance and the Liberation Cross.
“I was born with courage. I did not allow cruel people to find in me a person they could torture,” she said, as she marked her birthday with chocolates and flowers with friends on Monday.
“I saved 102 pilots before being arrested, interrogated and tortured. I suffer still from that. I still have the pain.”
A lot of us talk about freedom because it’s easy to talk the talk. We also tend to slip rather too easily into using words like fascist and communist and dictatorship when the only unpleasant reaction would be a dirty look or an unflattering vocal response. Andree Peel spent five years of her life living within a real world of terror where the price of resistance was torture and death.
In our heart of hearts how many of us could be absolutely sure that we would react as bravely and selflessly as did the tiny beautician from France?
She is within my mother’s generation (my mother still alive at 96). She is, as my mother would say, “a remarkable woman”! Sadly, they don’t make them like that anymore. I wish I could declare with certainty that I would be that brave.
It is a sad commentary to say what a Magniicent person she was and allow Islam to destroy the bravery of her and the men that stormed Normandy. Europe is allowing this to happen.
What a wonderful woman who showed true bravery in the face of evil. Rest In Peace.
Весьма забавное мнение…
Instead she risked her life distributing anti German […….
It is a sad commentary to say what a Magniicent person she was and allow Islam to destroy the bravery of her and the men that stormed Normandy. Europe is allowing this to happen.
She is within my mother’s generation (my mother still alive at 96). She is, as my mother would say, “a remarkable woman”! Sadly, they don’t make them like that anymore. I wish I could declare with certainty that I would be that brave.
What a wonderful woman who showed true bravery in the face of evil. Rest In Peace.
What a wonderful woman who showed true bravery in the face of evil. Rest In Peace.