Alix d'Unienville

Alix Marrier d'Unienville , MBE , LdeH, CdeG, (born May 8, 1918 in Mauritius , † November 10, 2015 in Paris , France ) was a French resistance fighter and writer. During the Second World War she worked in the Resistance for the liberation of France from the Nazi regime . After the end of the war, she worked as a war correspondent for the US armed forces, as a stewardess for Air France, as a journalist and writer.

Life

Alix Marrier d'Unienville was born in 1918 as the youngest of the four children of Baron Jules-Noël Marrier d'Unienville (1888-1959) and his wife Hélène Eduarda Marie Marrier de Lagatinierie (1886-1976) in Mauritius, then a British crown colony . The ancestors of the wealthy family were raised to the nobility in 1703 and originally settled in Île-de-France, but emigrated to Mauritius in the 18th century. In 1926 the family moved back to France and Alix grew up with her three older siblings (Solange, Marie Thérèse and France Charles Antoine) in a castle near Vannes in the Morbihan department in Brittany .

When France was occupied by the German Wehrmacht in May / June 1940 , the family fled to England and Alix subsequently worked at the headquarters of Forces françaises libres , the resistance organization founded by General de Gaulle in London. She wrote leaflets , which - thrown over France - should win young women and men for the French resistance movement. One day she was assigned to the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action , the secret service of France libre, and from there to the headquarters of the SOE , a special intelligence unit of the British in Baker Street. With the rank of lieutenant, she should work in the future in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) or in the RF section of the SOE (which was under the command of Charles de Gaulle's France Libre). She first went through the three-stage SOE training, including fitness training, training on handguns, combat techniques, handling explosives, map reading, parachuting, etc., and was then assigned to the RF section of the SOE.

On March 31, 1944, she was parachuted and dropped off over the Loir-et-Cher department for two million francs for the French resistance movement . The SOE had constructed a new identity for them for the mission: Alix d'Unienville was now called Aline Bavelan , was born on the island of Réunion in 1922 , came to France to study in 1938 and was the wife of a prisoner of war. In Paris she worked under the code names Myril and Marie-France as a courier for various resistance groups and transmitted information about the German occupation forces to the SOE headquarters in London. But she was exposed and on June 6, 1944, together with another agent named Tristan , she was arrested by Sipo / SD near the Le Bon Marché department store in Paris and taken to the BdS headquarters on Avenue Foch for interrogation . An initial search found her cyanide tablet and took it from her. As a result, she was held in solitary confinement in Fresnes Prison . She pretended to be mentally confused to be transferred from Fresnes to Sainte-Anne Hospital (l'Hôpital psychiatrique de Sainte-Anne). However, this plan was seen through by the Gestapo and they were taken to the Pithiviers transit camp , which from October 1943 served as a prison camp for political prisoners and was a preliminary stage for transport to concentration camps such as Buchenwald or Ravensbrück. D'Unienville was able to achieve her transfer to the Fort de Romainville prison camp , where she and Annie Hervé, another prisoner, planned to escape over the walls of the prison camp with the help of a rope they wanted to make from a curtain. The project failed, however, because Annie Hervé was deported to Germany.

D'Unienville was in one of the last convoys that were supposed to end up in a German concentration camp from Fort de Romainville . When the prisoners were sent over a road bridge over the Marne because the railway bridge had been destroyed by Allied bombing, she managed to escape. It was hidden by French families until it was liberated by the Allied forces. After the war, d'Unienville first worked as a war correspondent for the US armed forces in Southeast Asia, then as a stewardess for Air France , then as a journalist and author of fiction and non-fiction.

Awards

• Order of the British Empire
• Ordre national de la Legion d'honneur
• Croix de guerre 1939-1945
• Albert Londres Prize

Works (selection)

• 1949: En vol, journal d'une hôtesse de l'air
• 1954: Les Mascareignes. Vieille France en Mer Indiane
• 1957: Qui es-tu ?, Albin Michel
• 1961: Le point zéro. Roman situé à Rodrigues
• 1975: La fête secrète, roman. Collection Des roses pour Annick n ° 7, Presses Sélect Ltée
• 1976: Le Trésor de Dieu

Individual evidence

1. ^ Décès d'Alix d'Unienville, première femme prix Albert Londres. In: Le Figaro , November 13, 2015, accessed on December 12, 2015 (French).
2. ↑ Alix d'Unienville, SOE agent-obituary. In: The Daily Telegraph , November 20, 2015, accessed December 12, 2015.
3. ↑ Alix d'Unienville. In: The Times , December 3, 2015, accessed December 12, 2015.
4. ↑ Alix-Marrier Special Forces: Roll of Honor: Alix d'Unienville. In: specialforcesroh.com. Special Forces - Roll Of Honor. Accessed December 12, 2015.
5. ^ The Women. In: tempsfordmemorial.co.uk. The Tempsford Memorial Trust. Accessed December 12, 2015.
6. ^ Jules-Noël Marrier d'Unienville. In: geneanet.org. Retrieved December 12, 2015 (French).
7. ↑ Hélène Eduarda Marie Marrier de Lagatinierie. In: geneanet.org. Retrieved December 12, 2015 (French).
8. ↑ Biographies: Alix Marrier d'Unienville.
9. ^ Descendants de Jules "Noël" Marrier d'Unienville. (Family tree / graphic) In: geneanet.org. Retrieved December 12, 2015 (French).
10. ↑ Alix d'Unienville, SOE agent-obituary. In: The Daily Telegraph , November 20, 2015, accessed December 12, 2015.
11. ↑ Décès d'Alix d'Unienville, résistante et écrivain In: Le Matinal November 25, 2015 (French).
12. ↑ ^{a b} Paris 16 °, SiPo-SD (Gestapo) on gedenkorte-europa.eu, the homepage of Gedenkorte Europa 1939–1945
13. ↑ Documentation Obersalzberg: SS and police in the occupied areas ( Memento of the original from April 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
14. ^ House of History Baden-Württemberg: The Secret State Police Services in Occupied Europe
15. ^ House of History Baden-Wuerttemberg: Bds in the area of ​​the military commander for France in Paris
16. ↑ Annie Hervé (born Noël, born June 17, 1917 in Château-Chinon, Département Nièvre ) was a long-time member of the L'Union des etudiants communistes (UEC) (Union of Communist Students), a student organization that is part of the Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF or JC), which worked with the Parti communiste français. After the occupation of France, she worked for the Resistance. On May 9, 1940, she married Pierre Hervé , who was also a member of the L'Union des etudiants communistes (UEC) and worked for the Resistance. When he got into Gestapo custody in 1941, he and twenty other prisoners were freed from captivity by Annie Hervé in July 1941. The couple settled in the unoccupied zone of France (Vichy) and Annie Hervé worked in the Bureau d'Information et de Propaganda (BIP) of Georges Bidault . In July 1944 she got into Gestapo detention and was deported to Ravensbrück on August 3, 1944. In April 1945 she was liberated by troops of the Soviet army and returned to France. Mémoirs and Espoirs de la Resistance: Annie Hervé ; Fondation pour la memoire de la déportation: Transport parti de Paris le 3 août 1944 (I.257.) ; s. also French Wiki.