France's President Emmanuel Macron has paid tribute to former French Resistance activist and author Geneviève Callerot, who has died aged 108.
Callerot, who was among the last survivors of the groups that combatted the country’s World War II occupation by Nazi Germany, died Thursday in a care home in Saint-Aulaye-Puymangou, a town in the Dordogne region of southwestern France where she had lived since childhood, according to local media reports.
A statement from the presidential Elysée Palace said Macron offered “his heartfelt condolences to her loved ones, to all those who were illuminated by her solar presence, and finally to those whose lives she saved.”
Callerot “takes with her a little piece of France, a certain France that is tough on suffering and intimidation, tender toward the beauty of the world, as quick to raise its fist in the face of oppression as it is to extend its hand,” the statement said.
Born in 1916, Callerot was 24 when France surrendered to Adolf Hitler's invasion forces in June 1940, an event “which forever marked her life and revealed her to herself,” the statement said.
It said she and her family joined a Resistance network that smuggled people across the demarcation line that separated Nazi-occupied areas that included Paris, northern France and the country's Atlantic seaboard and the so-called free zone governed by the French Vichy administration that collaborated with the Nazi occupiers.
She participated in the escape of 200 men and women, including Jews and American and British war-wounded, “whose lives she saved with anonymous heroism, and who often never knew what they owed to this teenager,” Macron's office said. It said German forces took her into custody three times — twice releasing her for lack of evidence and holding her in prison for several weeks the third time.
She and her husband worked as farmers after the war.
When she was 67 she published her first novel — “Les cinq filles du Grand-Barrail,” or “The five girls of Grand-Barrail” — about a family of sharecroppers.
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This story has been corrected to show Callerot was 24-year-old in 1940 and not 14 as wrongly mentioned in the Elysée statement.
