Madeleine Riffaud, 'the Girl Who Saved Paris,' Dies at 100

Cross post from GD: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219758073

FULL story: http://archive.today/95i6R

Humiliated by a Nazi officer as a teenager, she joined the French Resistance. By the time she was 20, she had killed a German soldier, survived torture and captured a supply train.



Madeleine Riffaud in 1945. After serving in the French Resistance in World War II, she had a career as a poet and journalist.Credit...via Private collection/RetroNews-BnF

By Sam Roberts

Nov. 23, 2024

Madeleine Riffaud, a French Resistance hero who survived three weeks of torture as a teenager and who went on to celebrate her 20th birthday by helping to capture 80 Nazis on an armored supply train, died on Nov. 6 at her home in Paris. She was 100.

Her death was announced by her publisher, Dupuis. Ms. Riffaud went on to become a crusading anticolonial war correspondent.

She was propelled into the anti-Nazi guerrilla underground in November 1940 by a literal kick in the backside from a German officer. He sent her packing after he saw Nazi soldiers taunting her at a railway station as she was accompanying her ailing grandfather to visit her father near Amiens, in northern France.

“That moment,” Ms. Riffaud said in a 2006 interview with The Times of London, “decided my whole life.”

Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/23/world/europe/madeleine-riffaud-dead.html