In The News

Heroine of the French resistance dies

Heroine of the French resistance dies

A French woman who help save over 100 lives during the Second World War has died, aged 105.

Andree Peel passed away at a retirement home in England. During the war, as Andree Virot her work with the French Resistance saved the lives of over 100 British and US pilots.

Her network would hide the pilots and then help them escape back to Britain.

She was captured by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where she was condemned to death. But as the firing squad prepared to carry out the sentence, US forces arrived to liberate the prisoners.

After the war King George VI presented her with the King’s Commendation for Brave Conduct and she received the American Medal of Freedom from President Dwight Eisenhower. In France she also received the Legion d’Honneur.

While living in post-war Paris she met and married English academic John Peel and moved the England.

Andree Peel’s wartime exploits were recounted in her autobiography, Miracles Do Happen, which was published in 1999.

 

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