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Andrée de Jongh; Belgian Helped Airmen Avoid Nazis
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According to "The Freedom Line," the vice consul wondered how someone so attractive could also have had the stamina and wiles to evade the Germans for the 500-mile trip across occupied France.
"I'm as strong as a man," she replied. "Girls attract less attention in the frontier zone than men."
A young political secretary at the consulate persuaded his superiors that she was a legitimate resistance organizer.
Ms. de Jongh crossed the Pyrenees 24 times before the German authorities arrested her near the Spanish border. The Gestapo sent her to a series of prisons and concentration camps, and she ended the war at the Ravensbruck camp, near Berlin.
Her father had been executed by firing squad in Paris in 1944. Ms. de Jongh said she survived the war because the Germans might have been hoping to use her in a prisoner exchange.
After the war, she was feted at Buckingham Palace in London and received the George Medal, a top British civilian award for bravery. She was made a Belgian countess several decades later, after her career had taken her to Africa, first in the Belgian Congo and then in Ethiopia to work in a leper hospital in Addis Ababa.
She retired to Brussels after her eyesight faded and other medical ailments persisted. She periodically attracted media coverage as aging veterans she had helped made their way to Belgium to thank her for rescuing them.
She reminisced for the Times of London in 2000: "When the war was declared I knew what needed to be done. There was no hesitation. We could not stop doing what we had to do. We knew what the cost was. Even if it was at the expense of our lives, we had to fight until the last breath."
