Andrée Virot in the early 1940s.
Andrée Virot Peel and Loebertas Publishing
THE GERMANS WERE coming. Everyone in Brest, a French coastal town in the far northwest province of Brittany, had shut themselves inside their homes. Andrée Virot was inside her beauty salon, filled with a deep sadness. The street outside was absolutely quiet.
Suddenly, loud running footsteps shattered the silence. Andrée ran to the window. French soldiers were trying to escape from the fast-approaching Germans. In their military uniforms, they would certainly be taken prisoner by the Germans. Andrée quickly invited them to hide in her beauty salon. Then she ran from house to house, asking neighbors for men’s clothing. Everyone was willing to help, and the soldiers were able to go on their way disguised as civilians.
A short time later, a huge number of German troops appeared on the street, making a loud noise with their motorbikes, roughly pushing the people of Brest against the walls so they could parade through. As Andrée watched, a German officer approached her, sneering, and said, in very good French, “This upsets you, does it not? We are the conquerors!”
Andrée didn’t realize how precious her freedom or her country had been to her until that day, when she lost both to the Germans. When it became clear that Germans were now going to control everything printed in the newspapers that reached Brest, Andrée realized that the freedom to know the truth was something she especially wanted to fight for. So when she and her friends heard Charles de Gaulle’s radio message from London, they decided to copy it down and distribute it in as many places as possible. She then began to help distribute Brest’s underground newspaper.
Brest had been the headquarters of the French navy. When the Germans gained control of the town, they used France’s ships and submarines for their own plans, so Brest’s dockyards were always busy with German military activity. Frenchmen whom the Germans forced to work in the dockyards were able to observe activities and overhear conversations that were important to those trying to fight the Germans.
One day, one of the French dockyard workers passed some important information to Andrée, which included a stolen document. Andrée passed it on to an agent she knew who was working in the French Resistance. One thing led to another, and soon Andrée was working for an agent in London. Her code name was to be Rose, and she was put in charge of one section of the Brittany Bureau of Information, locating and passing on vital information regarding German activities on the coast of Brittany. She, and those working under her, reported on the movements of German troops and sailors, exactly where the Germans were building fortifications on the coast, and how much military equipment was being transported and where.
CHARLES DE GAULLE It is unclear exactly which Charles de Gaulle speech Andrée and her friends copied and distributed. De Gaulle’s first speech broadcast from London, L’Appel du 18 Juin (the Appeal of June 18), was not widely heard, but his speech of June 22 was. It is possible that Andrée copied either one or both. The following are translated excerpts of both speeches followed by an excerpt from L’Affiche de Londres (the Poster of London), which famously summarized de Gaulle’s views on the Resistance.
But has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No! … Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.
I invite all French land, sea and air forces, I invite the engineers and armament workers who find themselves in British territory to unite around me … I invite all Frenchmen who wish to remain free to listen to me and follow me.
Long live free France, with honour and independence!
France has lost a battle! But she has not lost the war!
Allied planes—British and, later, American—began conducting bombing raids against the German navy in Brittany. The bombing was fierce, frequent, and destructive, but the Germans always fought back by attacking these planes with antiaircraft guns, and they were often successful. The downed airmen, if they survived the crash, would then be captured by the Germans and sent to prison camps. That is, if the French people did not find them and hide them first.
Andrée and her team were in charge of rescuing these downed airmen. After hiding or destroying their parachutes, the team would find civilian clothes for the airmen and then locate safe houses where they could hide while escape plans were made. A rescue submarine was sent to the coast one night per month, when the moon was new. It was difficult to avoid being seen by the German guards who were stationed all along the coast, but Andrée, or one of her fellow Resistance workers, would take the airmen to the coast by bicycle. Sometimes they would have to find a hiding place to wait in until dark. Then, the airmen would walk out to the shore, get into the rowboats that had been launched onto the water by the rescue submarine, and row to the submarine.
Andrée and her team also worked in the French province of Normandy. Here they traded important information via planes, which would land in a rectangle of farmland, directed by the team’s flashlights. On one of these information exchanges, Andrée received a personal letter of thanks from Winston Churchill that read, “This last mission is the equivalent of a victory on the battlefield!” Andrée was profoundly moved by this note and knew that the Allied invasion of France was near. So she was very disappointed when she was told she must, for security reasons, destroy the note immediately.
A Resistance worker in Brest was captured by the Gestapo and, after being forced to watch members of his family tortured, gave the Gestapo the names of several Resistance workers, including Andrée’s. The family of this captured man warned those involved, but Andrée had only hours in which to act. She was told to escape to Paris and join the Resistance there, which she did, disguised as a blonde.
Another agent was captured and, under torture, gave away Andrée’s name and address in Paris. On May 10, 1944, Andrée was finally arrested. She was interrogated, brutally tortured, and then put into a cell with other prisoners, where she stayed for several weeks. Just before her second interrogation, she received news that the Allies had landed on the beaches of Normandy several days before. This news gave Andrée so much courage that she managed to fool her interrogators into believing she was no one of importance. And when she got back to her cell, Andrée decided to write the news of the Allied invasion backward on the window of her cell, so that anyone passing by might see it. They did, but, unfortunately, the passers-by were German guards. They threw Andrée into a darkened cell and kept her there, alone, for an entire week.
A few days after she was allowed to rejoin the other prisoners, Andrée and the others were packed onto a cattle car. They tried to keep their spirits up by loudly singing the “Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. As the trip went on, they noticed that when the train made its occasional stops, French was no longer being spoken, only German. They were on their way to Ravensbruck, the infamous women’s concentration camp.
There Andrée and the other prisoners each had a number tattooed on her arm. They were subjected to roll calls in the middle of the night, offered only thin clothing in spite of freezing temperatures, and given little to eat. Often, during the roll calls, which took hours, cartloads of corpses would be carried past them on their way to the crematorium, where the bodies would be burned. Andrée was appalled at the Nazi guards’ cruel and inhuman acts, which she witnessed on a daily basis at Ravensbruck. She was amazed that so many Germans were willing, and apparently eager, to treat their fellow humans beings in such unfeeling and cruel ways.
Andrée had made friends with some Polish prisoners who, although they had not been Resistance fighters, had been arrested and brought to Ravensbruck simply because they were Polish. They had been taught perfect French, were very friendly, and enjoyed many conversations with Andrée. Then one day, they saved her life.
During a roll call, a Nazi official was moving slowly through the rows of prisoners, looking at each prisoner intently. He stopped and looked at Andrée for a long moment.
“Take that woman’s number,” he shouted, lashing at Andrée with his whip, “for the gas chamber!”
A guard came up to Andrée and violently twisted her arm so that he could see the number tattooed on it. He wrote her number on a piece of paper, then walked away and placed the paper on a table containing a pile of similar papers with the numbers of other doomed prisoners. Andrée was filled with a deep sadness. She would never see her family again. She would not live to see France freed from Nazi tyranny.
Suddenly, one of her Polish friends started to crawl on the ground through the rows of prisoners until she reached the table with the papers. She snatched the paper with Andrée’s number on it, returned to her place in line, and then ate the paper. Amazingly, none of the guards saw her. Andrée’s life was saved.
After being moved to a different camp called Buchenwald, Andrée learned that the Allied armies were now in Germany. She could hear the noises of battle, the sounds of bombarding planes, coming closer and closer. A group of leaflets appeared in the camp with the following message: “Take courage, we are on our way!”
Then one day, an order for a roll call came in the afternoon, which was very unusual. Also unusual was the order to “line up.” Andrée realized what it meant: they were going to be shot. The Nazis would attempt to hide from the world what they had done. This was indeed what the guards were planning. They had exchanged their distinctive armbands for those of the Red Cross, hoping to trick the Allies and evade arrest. The firing squad was approaching the prisoners.
Then, suddenly, they turned and ran in the opposite direction. The prisoners soon discovered the reason: one of the prisoners, who understood German, had been hiding under the telephone table and had overheard a call in which a woman said to the commandant of the firing squad, “The Americans are at the gates of the town. We saw you enter the camp to kill the prisoners. If you want to stay alive, spare the lives of these prisoners.” The soldiers evidently believed the phone call.
For her work in the French Resistance, which included saving the lives of over 100 Allied servicemen, Andrée received numerous awards from the governments of France, England, and the United States. In 1999 Andrée wrote her memoir, Miracles Do Happen!, and in 2008, a British film about her life was released called Rose: Portrait of a Resistance Fighter. She died in March 2010 at the age of 104 in the village of Long Ashton, North Somerset, England, where she had made her home for many years.
LEARN MORE Miracles Do Happen! by Andrée Virot Peel (Loebertas, 1999).
“Andrée Marthe Virot Peel” by Marilyn Turkovich Voices Education Project
http://voiceseducation.org/content/andree-marthe-virot-peel.
“WWII Resistance Fighter Celebrates Her 104th Birthday by Breaking Silence on Wartime Heroics”
British Mail Online
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1134967/WWII-Resistance-fighter-marks-104th-birthday-breaking-silence-wartime-heroics.html.