Andre Peel, Rescuer of Allied Airmen, Dies at 105

Andre Peel, a highly decorated French resistance figure who helped save dozens of American and British airmen shot down over France during World War II, died on March 5 in the English village of Long Ashton, outside Bristol. She was 105.
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She was best remembered for playing an important role in the rescue of 102 Allied airmen, by her account, in a network that set up safe houses for fliers on the run from the Germans and then took the men to isolated sections of the Brest beaches, where they boarded boats transporting them to England.
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She was beaten and tortured, then imprisoned at the Ravensbrck and Buchenwald concentration camps. She was about to be killed by a firing squad at Buchenwald when it was liberated by American troops in April 1945.

“I saved 102 pilots before being arrested, interrogated and tortured,” the BBC quoted her as once having said. “I suffer still from that. I still have the pain.”
…On Feb. 3 she celebrated her 105th birthday at her nursing home. Wearing 11 decorations for valor on her blouse, she was presented with a cake decorated with the French flag and sang the French national anthem.

“You don’t know what freedom is if you have never lost it,” Mrs. Peel once told The Bristol Evening Post. “The only fear we had was of being tortured and of speaking under torture,” she added. “I rarely thought of my personal safety. I just acted and did what I believed was the right thing.”