Celebrating the 104th birthday of a war heroine

Today’s BBC reports on the birthday of Andree Peel a French resistance heroine who saved more than 100 lives and survived a Nazi death squad. She celebrated her 104th birthday at home in Long Ashton, North Somerset.

Andrée Virot was running her own beauty salon in the Brittany port of Brest when the Germans invaded. Inspired by de Gaulle, she fought the occupying forces with information -at first she was involved in simply distributing clandestine newspapers, but soon she was made Head of an Under-Section in the Resistance, reporting on troop movements, naval installations and the results of Allied attacks. Agent ‘Rose’, as she was called, and her team used torches to guide Allied planes to improvised landing-strips, and smuggled fugitive airmen onto submarines and gun-boats on remote parts of the coast.

In 1943 she was betrayed and captured. She was sent to Ravensbruck and then to Buchenwald. She was being lined up to be shot by firing squad when the liberating American army arrived. Back in Brest she found her father and brother had been killed, and she moved to Paris to run a restaurant on the Left Bank. It was here that she met a young English academic named John Peel. She subsequently moved to England

She was also presented with the Croix de Guerre, the American Medal of Freedom, and two Legions d'Honneur.

"I saved 102 pilots before being arrested, interrogated and tortured. I suffer still from that. I still have the pain," she said. "I was born with courage. I did not allow cruel people to find in me a person they could torture."

What more can one say. Mrs Peel is a remarkable and courageous woman. Many happy returns!