PARIS (AP) — France’s President Emmanuel Macron has paid tribute to former French Resistance activist and writer Geneviève Callerot, who has died aged 108.
Callerot, who was among the many final survivors of the teams that combatted the nation’s World Conflict II occupation by Nazi Germany, died Thursday in a care residence in Saint-Aulaye-Puymangou, a city within the Dordogne area of southwestern France the place she had lived since childhood, based on native media reviews.
A press release from the presidential Elysée Palace mentioned Macron provided “his heartfelt condolences to her family members, to all those that have been illuminated by her photo voltaic presence, and eventually to these whose lives she saved.”
Callerot “takes along with her a bit piece of France, a sure France that’s robust on struggling and intimidation, tender towards the fantastic thing about the world, as fast to lift its fist within the face of oppression as it’s to increase its hand,” the assertion mentioned.
Born in 1916, Callerot was 24 when France surrendered to Adolf Hitler’s invasion forces in June 1940, an occasion “which endlessly marked her life and revealed her to herself,” the assertion mentioned.
It mentioned she and her household joined a Resistance community that smuggled folks throughout the demarcation line that separated Nazi-occupied areas that included Paris, northern France and the nation’s Atlantic seaboard and the so-called free zone ruled by the French Vichy administration that collaborated with the Nazi occupiers.
She participated within the escape of 200 women and men, together with Jews and American and British war-wounded, “whose lives she saved with nameless heroism, and who usually by no means knew what they owed to this teenager,” Macron’s workplace mentioned. It mentioned German forces took her into custody 3 times – twice releasing her for lack of proof and holding her in jail for a number of weeks the third time.
She and her husband labored as farmers after the conflict.
When she was 67 she revealed her first novel – “Les cinq filles du Grand-Barrail,” or “The 5 ladies of Grand-Barrail” – a few household of sharecroppers.
