#frenchresistence

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GPQN1XV5 Since the day she buried her four-year-old daughter, professional researcher and historian Dr. Isa Reynard struggles each day to survive. In the midst of a routine assignment, she uncovers unexplainable inconsistencies in the paperwork of a long-dead WWII Monuments Man. Her curiosity piqued, Isa begins to uncover the truth, inciting someone who will do…

Berthe Fraser

Born in 1894 as Berthe Vicogne and married an Englishman, becoming a British subject although they remained living in Arras, France.  Berthe was a housewife, and remained one while organizing a devious and complicated underground to help British soldiers escape Nazi-occupied France.

In 1940 she started to help the hundreds of British soldiers roaming the French towns and countryside to reach the coast, where they were smuggled to England.  She was betrayed in 1941 and arrested by the Gestapo.  They sent her to a Belgian prison, where she spent 15 months, being released in December 1942.

As soon as she returned to France, Berthe started a new phase of resistance.  She helped the Allies by supplying English agents with shelter, transport and safe hiding places.  She arranged meetings between English agents and French resistance fighters.  She also acted as a courier, transporting messages, documents, weapons and even dynamite by car or by foot.

In February of 1944 she was betrayed again, this time by one of the English agents she had saved.  The Gestapo took her to the prison at Loos and she was tortured and threatened with death every day for almost seven months.  When not being tortured, she was kept in solitary confinement.  She did not betray anyone during this torture and was finally sentenced to death.

On September 1, 1944 the Allies stormed the prison and freed Berthe, who was awaiting execution and reportedly barely hanging onto life.  Her words were, “Thank you boys, you are just in time.”