On Boulevard des Poilus — the sun-dappled, tree-lined street in Aix-en Provence where the former Miollis army barracks is located — lycée students walk to school and women carrying shopping bags make their way to the local markets. There’s no sign anywhere that one of the French Resistance’s most daring escapes — by spy leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcade — took place on that quiet thoroughfare 78 years before.

Captured by the Gestapo and thrown into a stuffy barracks cell on a hot July night in 1944, Marie-Madeleine began searching for a possible escape route almost immediately. But first, she walked over to the cell’s barred window to get a breath of air. Standing there, she took a closer look at the window, which was large and had no glass panes. A thick, horizontal wooden board was screwed into the window frame and blocked more than half the opening, leaving a relatively small space at the top to allow in air. There was also a space between the board and the bars covering the window.

Without the right tools, it would be impossible to remove the board and one or more of the bars. But could she possibly slip between the board and the bars and ease her body out? Marie-Madeleine, who grew up in Shanghai, remembered her father telling her how Chinese robbers would oil their bodies to squeeze through the bars of the gates and windows of houses they had chosen as targets. Thanks to her extreme fear and the stifling heat, her own slight, slender body was slick with sweat. Could she follow the bandits’ example? She decided to try.

She waited until about 3 a.m., when the guards outside her cell went off duty. Pushing the cot under the window, she picked up a large wash basin, turned it upside down, and put it on the cot. After taking off all her clothes, she climbed onto the basin, a light summer dress clenched between her teeth.

She managed to pull herself up and over the board. With her body tightly pinned between the board and the bars, she began trying to ease her head between the gaps. The first two were far too narrow. The next one was wider, and she thrust her head as hard as she could through the opening.

Although extraordinarily painful, the maneuver worked: her head popped through. With her body slick with perspiration, she squeezed one shoulder through, then her right leg. The most searing pain came when she began easing her right hip through; she told herself that the agony of torture would be far worse than what she was enduring now.

Miraculously she succeeded and found herself out on the ledge, with her dress still gripped between her teeth. Just as she was about to jump, she saw a sentry standing in front of the barracks, a few hundred feet away from her window. When she touched the ground, the soft thud of her feet alerted the sentry, who clicked on his flashlight and shouted, “Who’s there?” She lay flat, and the beam of the flashlight passed above her. When the sentry finally turned it off and moved away, she wrapped her dress around her neck and scuttled on her knees, like a crab, across the street.

There, she jumped up and ran off, stumbling in the darkness. Crossing another street, she spied a graveyard — le Cimetiere Saint-Pierre — which was dotted with family mausoleums, some as big as chapels. She put on her dress, found a crypt with a broken door and crept inside. Sinking down to rest, she examined the damage to her body from the escape: her face was bruised and bloodied, her knees badly skinned, and the soles of her bare feet shredded from running through brambles and on the stony streets.

She knew she couldn’t stay there for more than a few minutes. Dawn was beginning to break, and before long, the guards would open the door to her cell and find her missing. It was vital that she reach Helen des Isnards’ house in the country no later than 7 a.m., to stop him from going to her flat in Aix and walking into a Gestapo trap.

The trouble was that, although she had been there several times, she was not sure how to get to the road leading to the house. Trembling with fear and pain, she retraced her steps through town, past the barracks from which she had just escaped. Everything was quiet in the golden early-morning light, and although a few passersby looked curiously at the young woman with bloodied bare feet, the sentry in front of the barracks paid her little heed.

Just a few minutes later, as she finally turned onto the road leading to des Isnards’ house, she heard in the distance the sounds she had feared: the barking of dogs and the unearthly din of sirens. They had discovered her escape.

She kept walking as her mind scrambled to come up with a way to dodge the roadblock that would soon be set up on this road, as well as on all the others leading out of Aix. Leaving the road, she headed into the field that stretched beside it, where a number of old peasant women were gleaning stray ears of corn left on the ground from the previous harvest. Marie-Madeleine joined them, stooping over and picking up an ear or two, while, from the corner of her eye, she saw soldiers halting foot and motor traffic and checking papers. None of them paid attention to the women in the field.

Marie-Madeleine continued gleaning for several more minutes — until the soldiers and roadblock were well in the distance. Joining the road again, she finally found des Isnards’ house. The front door was unlocked, and Marie-Madeleine limped inside. As she did, she called out the names of des Isnards and his wife. She opened their bedroom door, and they sprang from their bed, their eyes wide with surprise. “I’ve just escaped,” she said. And then she collapsed.

*

Within an hour of her arrival, Marie-Madeleine, des Isnards, his wife and small daughter were gone. Putting two-year-old Catherine on the back of her bicycle, the pregnant Marie-Solange des Isnards cycled about twenty miles to a chateau owned by members of her husband’s family north of Aix-en-Provence. Helen des Isnards, meanwhile, whisked Fourcade off to a hideout he shared with other local resistance groups in the hills near Aix.

According to an Alliance operative who brought her a change of clothes, the Germans were rampaging through Aix in a door-to-door search for her and des Isnards, but thus far his headquarters had not been touched and all his agents were in hiding. Des Isnards’ radio operator, Michel Leveque, brought his transmitter to the hideout. Late that night, they would move on to a maquis camp near Sainte Victoire, the impressive limestone peak looming over Aix.

In the previous few months, the maquis — members of quasi-guerrilla groups who lived off the land — had become a major force in the French resistance. Most of them were young Frenchmen who had left their homes and gone underground to avoid being sent to Germany as forced laborers. But the maquis with whom des Isnards cooperated were mostly Spaniards who had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and had fled to France after General Franco’s fascist forces took control of the country in 1939.

In 2022, the narrow, winding road leading to the mountain is paved and well-marked. But in July 1944, when Marie Madeleine and her two companions set out by foot, all of them carrying bags and weapons, it was strewn with rocks and gravel. Her lacerated feet were still raw, and the hike, which was steeply uphill and took all night, was both painful and terrifying. At the slightest sound, the three took cover in the underbrush bordering the road. Such interruptions were frequent, as a seemingly endless parade of German patrol vehicles passed by. Marie-Madeleine found it increasingly difficult to walk, and des Isnards and Leveque had to help carry her.

As they approached the camp at daybreak, she collapsed, and a mule-driven cart was summoned to take her the rest of the way. The camp was well protected: sentries stood guard in a stand of juniper trees on a small bluff overlooking the road, and the camp itself was tucked away in a clearing surrounded by dense thickets of underbrush. Thanks to des Isnards and Alliance, the maquis, as well as other resistance groups in the area, were well supplied with weapons, other military gear, and food.

In a corner of the clearing, Leveque set up his battery-powered transmitter, with its aerial wrapped around a pine tree. After she recovered from the grueling hike, Marie-Madeleine set to work encoding the messages that continued flooding in from Alliance sectors around the country. The miracle of the network, she later told one of her agents, was that, despite all the attempts to kill it, it “constantly pushed back. It never stopped working.”

Marie-Madeleine loved everything about her days at the maquis camp, particularly the experience of working and sleeping outdoors in the cool, drier air of Saint-Victoire’s foothills. After more than a week in this idyllic setting, she decided that, with her feet almost completely healed, it was time to move on to Paris. She dyed her hair yet again and had a new photograph taken. Armed with a new name and a new set of forged identity papers, she left the camp on July 29, riding pillion on a motorcycle behind one of the maquis, her arms clasped tightly around his leather-jacketed middle.

Three weeks later, Paris was liberated. Marie-Madeleine was not in the capital for the delirious celebrations that followed. A few days earlier, she had left for northeastern France to scout out information about German positions for the U.S. Third Army as it dashed toward the German border.

In the south of France, meanwhile, Helen des Isnards and his agents provided vital intelligence for the landing of Allied forces on the Cote d’Azur in mid-August. After helping to liberate Aix on August 21, des Isnards joined American troops in their drive up the Rhone Valley.

I finish my mission to retrace Marie-Madeleine’s escape at lunch on the terrace of an elegant boutique hotel boasting a spectacular view of Sainte Victoire and the nearby Chateau Vauvenargues. Not far away, in thickets of underbrush, the maquis had set up the camp where Marie-Madeleine took refuge. During our lunch, my companions and I raise a toast to her and the many tens of thousands of other French resistance fighters, most of them now forgotten, who risked — and lost — their lives to return freedom and honor to their country.

How France’s Top Woman Spy Escaped from the Nazis—Part 2 was originally published in Unsung Heroes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On a hot, sultry night in July 1944, the head of the most important Allied spy network in occupied France lay on a jail-cell cot and thought about killing herself.

A few hours earlier, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, code-named Hedgehog, had been captured by the Gestapo in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. The Germans knew she was an intelligence agent but at that point had no idea of her real identity or importance. According to her papers — forged, of course — she was a French housewife named Germaine Pezet. Dour and dowdy, she wore glasses, was drably dressed, and had lusterless, jet-black hair. It was the latest of her many disguises, this one concocted in part by a dentist in London who had made the dental prosthetic that had helped transform her appearance. No outward trace remained of the chic blonde Parisienne she’d been before the war — a woman born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamor.

As she lay on the cot, Marie-Madeleine was sure she would be interrogated and tortured the next day, and the Gestapo would discover her true identity. Should she swallow the cyanide pill she’d hidden in her purse? She hesitated. Not yet, she thought. Maybe — just maybe — she could find a way out.

*

Seventy-eight years after that night, l’m standing on a quiet, narrow street not far from Aix’s bustling center — in front of a barred window on the first floor of the stately stone building where Marie-Madeleine had been imprisoned. Having written about her extraordinary life in my book, Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, I’ve come to Aix to retrace her movements and visit the places that figured in the most spine-tingling episode of her life.

Once the capital of old Provence, Aix today is one of the most beautiful towns in the south of France, with its cobblestone streets, majestic shade trees, elegant fountains, thriving markets, and vibrant café life. But in July 1944, it, like most German-occupied French cities and towns, was a tinderbox. The Allies had invaded Normandy the month before, and the Germans, their backs to the wall, were desperate to keep Allied troops bottled up in the north of the country and wipe out resistance fighters throughout the rest of France. One of the top targets on their most-wanted list was Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the head of the Alliance network.

Marie Madeleine had joined the Resistance four years before, soon after the Germans vanquished France in June 1940 — one of a mere handful of French men and women to defy the Nazis that early in the war. In 1941, at the age of 31, she became la patronne — the boss — of Alliance, which would soon emerge as the largest and most influential Allied intelligence group in France. Throughout the war, Alliance, which had some 3,000 agents throughout the country, supplied the British and American high commands with vital German military secrets. In 1943, the network presented the Allies with one of the greatest intelligence coups of the war — information about Hitler’s new terror weapons, the V-I flying bomb and the V-2 rocket. In 1944, three months before D-Day, it handed over to the operation’s planners a 55-foot-long map showing every German gun emplacement, fortification, road, and beach obstacle on the Normandy beaches on which the Allies would land.

Until July 1944, Marie-Madeleine, the only woman to lead a major French resistance group, had managed to elude her foes. Many others in her network had not been as fortunate. For the previous year and a half, the Gestapo, in its relentless vendetta against this spy outfit that had caused so much havoc to German operations, had engaged in a ruthless effort to wipe Alliance out. Hundreds of her agents, among them the man she loved, had been swept up in wave after wave of arrests; whole sectors had been annihilated. In the summer of 1944, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade had no idea how many of her people were still alive.

For several months before D-Day, she had been in London, working with MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency. MI6 officials, convinced she would be tracked down and killed by the Gestapo if she returned to France, begged her to stay in England. But she insisted on going back to rebuild her crippled network. Her first stop would be in southeast France, which boasted the only stable, secure Alliance operation in the country.

On July 10, Marie-Madeleine arrived in Aix-en-Provence and was met by the head of the southeast sector — Count Helen des Isnards — a daring, tough young aristocrat whose skills as a resistance leader had greatly impressed her and the men of MI6. Des Isnards took her to the hideout he’d found for her — a flat on rue Granet, a narrow, quiet street, which today is lined with elegant shops, near the Cours Mirabeau, Aix’s grand, tree-shaded boulevard.

Des Isnards left her with several thick stacks of intelligence reports from the surviving Alliance sectors throughout France, including information about the Germans’ secret terror weapons, as well as Wehrmacht troop movements on the Normandy front. She spent several days decoding them, then handed the decoded versions over to des Isnards for transmission to London.

At that point, he told her it was time to leave Aix. The Gestapo were on the rampage throughout Provence, tracking down, arresting, and executing dozens of local resistance members. It was only a matter of time before they found her.

On July 16, as she was packing to leave the next day, she heard loud voices on the stairwell. Her door crashed open, and more than a dozen gun-waving men speaking German rushed in. Grabbing her, the leader of the group shouted that they were looking for one of the leaders of a terrorist resistance network called Alliance — a tall, fair man whose code name was Grand Duke. He was describing des Isnards — and had no idea that the head of Alliance was standing right in front of him.

Ignoring Marie-Madeleine’s protests that she knew nothing about this man, the Germans began searching the flat, turning over the mattress in the bedroom, pulling out the contents of the closets, and rummaging through the cupboards, bureaus, and her suitcases. Initially, they missed the intelligence reports she had hidden under the divan and inside the cushions of two footstools. But just as they were about to leave, one of them glanced under the divan, and with a shout, pulled out a large handful of coded reports.

Incandescent with rage, the leader of the raiding party violently shook her. “Who are you?” he roared. She replied that she was a spy sent by London to meet some agents in Aix. She wouldn’t tell them her real name.

She was hustled into a car and driven through the streets of Aix to the Miollis barracks, an impressive complex of tall stone buildings with red-tile roofs on the edge of town. Built to house French troops, the barracks were now under German control; one floor of the headquarters building had been turned into a Gestapo prison for captured resistance fighters.

The other cells were full that day, so Marie-Madeleine was shoved into a small room near the guardhouse that had been turned into a spillover cell and stank of urine, sweat, and tobacco. She was told that Ernst Dunker, the fearsome head of the Gestapo in Marseille, would come to Aix the next morning to interrogate her. Sinking down on a cot covered with a filthy gray blanket, Marie-Madeleine glanced despairingly at the cell’s heavily bolted door.

Notwithstanding her outward composure in front of the Germans, she was in fact mortally afraid of the ordeal that would face her in the morning. Would she be able to remain silent and withstand the beatings and other forms of torture that would surely follow? Fearing she might break down, she thought about the cyanide pill in her purse.

But she realized that if she took it, des Isnards would not know what had happened to her. He would come to her hideout as planned the next morning to take her away, and the Gestapo would be there, waiting for him. He and his operation, the bulwark of Alliance, would be wiped out, and almost certainly the entire network as well.

Before deciding to take that irreversible step, she must explore — however unlikely — every possible means of escape.

TO BE CONTINUED

How France’s Top Woman Spy Escaped from the Nazis—Part 1 was originally published in Unsung Heroes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Largely forgotten today, Diane Nash, a former beauty queen with the delicate features of a porcelain doll, was arguably the most daring young civil rights leader in the United States in the 1960s. At the age of 21, she was the head of the student movement that desegregated lunch counters in Nashville. A year later, while still in college, she assumed command of the Freedom Rides, the highly dangerous bus trips taken by civil rights workers through the Deep South.

By all rights, Diane, whom I write about in Freedom’s Daughters, should have been elected the first head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the national student organization that played such a huge role in the later movement. But she was passed over in favor of a male colleague. The reason was sexism, said John Lewis, another young civil rights leader: “There was a desire to emphasize and showcase black manhood.”

Although Diane Nash unquestionably deserves a place in the civil rights pantheon next to male icons like John Lewis and Martin Luther King, she, like so many other women activists, has disappeared into the cracks of history.

Diane Nash, Forgotten Civil Rights Hero was originally published in Unsung Heroes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In May 1940, thanks to a group of anti-appeasement British members of Parliament, Neville Chamberlain was ousted as prime minister and Winston Churchill was summoned to power just as Hitler invaded Western Europe. One of the MPs who rebelled against Chamberlain was a woman, who, as the wife of the Duke of Atholl, also happened to be a high-ranking member of Britain’s aristocracy.

The boldest of the rebels, Kitty Atholl was an especially outspoken critic of Chamberlain, and the prime minister and his supporters set out to destroy her politically. In 1938, they kicked her out of the Conservative Party and nominated another candidate for her seat in a special election. Shockingly, because of her gender, none of her fellow insurgents stood up for her. Most of them had been adamantly opposed to the idea of women serving in the House of Commons. Defeated by a very small margin, the Duchess of Atholl retired from politics and spent the war working to help refugees throughout Europe. But as I write in my book Troublesome Young Men, she had the satisfaction of knowing that, if it hadn’t been for her and her anti-appeasement colleagues, Churchill would never have had a chance to become prime minister and Britain might well have negotiated for peace with Hitler or gone down to defeat.

Duchess of Atholl, Outspoken Critic of Chamberlain, Self-Proclaimed Crusader Against International… was originally published in Unsung Heroes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As ruler of the Netherlands for more than fifty years, Queen Wilhelmina was hardly an unknown figure in her country or the world. But the strong-willed monarch had virtually no power or authority: as the head of a constitutional monarchy, she was almost totally ignored by the Dutch government. All that changed when the Netherlands was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1940, and Wilhelmina escaped to London.

From there, she became the heart and soul of her country’s resistance, delivering passionate, fiery anti-Nazi broadcasts over the BBC to her people back home. Early in the war, the prime minister and several other members of the Dutch government-in-exile wanted to approach Hitler to seek a separate peace. Wilhelmina, as I write in Last Hope Island, was determined to fight on. After she informed the Dutch prime minister she had lost all confidence in him, he resigned and she appointed the only member of the government she thought shared her fierce hatred of the Nazis and determination to fight them to the end. Given the chance to exercise real leadership, Wilhelmina made the most of it. She stopped her defeatist government from capitulating, kept the Netherlands in the fight, and inspired and united her people. In doing all this, as one Dutch historian said, she “won a place in Dutch history second to none.”

Queen Wilhelmina, Heart and Soul of the Dutch Resistance was originally published in Unsung Heroes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When Belgium was occupied by Germany in May 1940, the father of Andrée de Jongh burst into tears. His daughter, a 23-year-old graphic designer who lived in Brussels, fiercely responded: “You are wrong to cry. You’ll see what we do to them.” A year later, Andrée, who was known as Dédée, was the head of an escape line for Allied servicemen trapped in enemy territory — and one of the top resistance leaders in Europe.

Risking their lives every day, she and the dozens of other young women who belonged to her Comet Line sheltered servicemen on the run and escorted them hundreds of miles through Nazi-infested Belgium and France to neutral Spain. As one British intelligence officer observed, “It is not an easy matter to hide … a foreigner in your midst, especially when it happens to be a red-haired Scotsman or a gum-chewing American from the Middle West.” The largest and most important escape line in occupied Europe, Dédée’s group would be credited after the war with rescuing more than eight hundred British and American troops and airmen and smuggling them back to freedom. I tell their story in my book Last Hope Island.

Andrée de Jongh, Top Resistance Leader and Creator of the Largest Escape Line in Occupied Europe was originally published in Unsung Heroes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When the Nazis occupied France in 1940, 21-year-old Jeannie Rousseau had just graduated at the top of her class from Paris’s most elite university. An expert at concealing her brilliance beneath a charmingly innocent exterior, Rousseau took advantage of the fact that most men, while appreciating her effervescent charm and pert good looks, failed to take her seriously.

Such was the case in 1943, when she became acquainted with a group of young German military officers in Paris while working as an interpreter for a syndicate of French industrialists. The officers began inviting the pretty young Parisienne, who spoke flawless German, to evening parties, where they talked indiscreetly about their work, including the testing of secret weapons on Germany’s Baltic coast. Playing the role of a wide-eyed coquette, Rousseau insisted that their stories of rockets and unpiloted jet aircraft couldn’t possibly be true. They showed her drawings, reports, and charts that proved otherwise.

After each evening, Rousseau, who was in fact a spy for the Alliance intelligence network, went to a safe house in Paris and wrote down, word for word, what she had learned. Within a few weeks, the voluminous amount of information she had acquired about the German terror weapons — the V1 and V2 — was dispatched to London. One of the greatest Allied intelligence coups of the war, her material enabled the British to delay the development of those weapons and blunt their impact once they were finally launched.

Jeannie Rousseau, World War II Spy and a Leader of the French Resistance was originally published in Unsung Heroes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 1941. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, a 31-year-old Frenchwoman born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour, became the leader of a vast Allied spy network in occupied France — the only woman to serve as a chef de résistance during the war. Strong-willed, independent, and a lifelong rebel against her country’s patriarchal society, Marie-Madeleine, as I write in Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, was tailor-made for the job.

No other French resistance network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence to the Allies as did Marie-Madeline’s group, which was called Alliance. The Gestapo pursued its three thousand agents relentlessly, capturing, torturing, and executing hundreds of them, including Marie-Madeleine’s lover. Although she moved her headquarters every few weeks, constantly changing her hair color, clothing, and identity, she was captured twice by the Nazis. Both times she managed to escape — once by slipping naked through the bars of her jail cell — and continued to hold her network together even as it repeatedly threatened to crumble around her.

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network was originally published in Unsung Heroes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 27-year-old Darya Vasylchenko worked in public relations for the Kyiv city government. She is now a soldier and medic on the front lines outside the city. “We have arranged everything here for a nice welcome” for the Russians, she told an American reporter, patting the rifle she held in her hands.

Darya’s willingness to confront Ukraine’s invaders echoes a similar courage shown by other women whose countries faced invasion and the threat of dictatorship in earlier wars. In 1940, when the Nazis occupied most of Western Europe, 22-year-old Jeannie Rousseau had just graduated at the top of her class from one of Paris’s elite universities, while Andrée de Jongh, a 24-year-old Belgian, worked as a graphic artist in Brussels. In a matter of months, Jeannie had become one of the French resistance’s top spies, responsible for one of the greatest Allied intelligence coups of the war. Dedee de Jongh, meanwhile, was the creator of the largest escape line in occupied Europe, smuggling hundreds of shot-down British and American airmen out of enemy territory and back to freedom.

As a historian, I’ve always been drawn to unsung heroes like these — individuals of moral courage and conscience who helped change their country and the world but who, for various reasons, have slipped into the shadows of history. While many of the heroes I’ve spotlighted in my books have been men, I’ve become particularly interested in the crucial contributions of women, whose achievements were — and still are — overlooked even more than those of their male counterparts.

I’d like to introduce you to a few of them — women who refused to accept the destruction of basic human rights and the dishonor and degradation of their countries, whether by a foreign power or by injustices committed by their own countrymen. Their accomplishments prove that you don’t need to be a general, a president, or a prime minister to be a hero — that in fact, ordinary women — and men — can make a huge difference when they stand up for what they believe.

Unsung Heroes: Forgotten Women Who Changed History was originally published in Unsung Heroes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.