French Veterans Honor Leader of Resistance
Hundreds of bemedaled war veterans paid tribute Wednesday to France’s greatest woman Resistance leader, who died last Thursday at the age of 80.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the only woman to have led a major Resistance force, was a young, middle-class mother when she gave up her comfortable life style in 1940 to join the underground movement fighting the Nazi occupation of France.
From 1941 until the liberation of France in 1944, she was in charge of 3,000 members of one of the country’s most important Resistance networks, known as “Noah’s Ark,” the only woman to hold such a senior position.
She was arrested in the south of France in 1944 but managed to escape by squeezing through the bars of her cell.
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