We all have our own ideas of what a hero is and what a hero does. For some a hero is the Arnold Schwarzenegger type – rushing in with guns blazing and saving whole populations while expending several hundred bullets in the process. For others, heroes are quieter types, saving people with vaccines or agricultural breakthroughs. Few think of women as heroes, even in today’s more liberated society, but several exist, and though one of them carried a gun, she was far from a Schwarzenegger clone.
Cecile Pearl Cornioley was born in 1914 in Paris to English parents. Her father, who travelled a great deal selling banknote paper for a Swiss company, was a drunkard and a spendthrift. His lifestyle ruined the family and Cecile was forced to go to work at 17 as a secretary, teaching English at night. When France was invaded in 1940 she and her mother and three sisters were able to escape to London. She joined the Air Ministry in London but was hired by the SOE (Special Operations Executive) in 1943. After training in September, 1943, she parachuted into France to work as a courier between the British and French Resistance. She was only 29 but had enough confidence, training, and presence to command a unit of 3,000 underground fighters that regularly interrupted railway service from the south of France to Normandy, killed 1,000 German soldiers, and oversaw the surrender of 18,000 enemy troops.
Mrs. Cornioley was not the only female secret agent in the SOE, but she was the only one to become a network leader. Marcus Binney, in his book “The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Agents of the Special Operations Executive (2002)” states that “At a time when women in the armed forces were restricted to a strictly noncombatant role in warfare, the women of SOE trained and served along-side the men. They fought not in the front line but well behind it.” Cornioley died at the age of 93 on February 24, 2008.
Another hero of the same era, but working in an entirely different sphere was Irena Sendler. Ms. Sendler lived in Warsaw during the Second World War and is credited with smuggling about 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, some of them in baskets. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 Irena was a twenty-nine year old social worker in the city’s welfare department. Realizing that the children of the ghetto faced certain death, Sendler began to plan and carry out rescue missions. When typhoid broke out in Warsaw Sendler and her assistants talked their way into the ghetto on the pretext of health inspections. They smuggled babies and small children out in ambulances and trams, often wrapping them up as packages. If teenagers were able to get out of the ghetto by joining labour brigades that worked on the outside, Sendler and her team placed them in orphanages, with reliable families, in convents, or even in hospitals.
In 1943 the Gestapo began to suspect Ms. Sendler and came to her house to arrest her. One of her associates was able to hide the evidence of the organization, which Irena later buried under an associate’s apple tree. Between the time that the walled ghetto was erected in 1940, and the time it was destroyed by the Germans in 1943, the twenty people on Sendler’s team rescued about 2,500 children.
Irena Sendler died at the age of 98 on May 12, 2008. She was one of the first to be honoured by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her work.
Heroes are also survivors. Maude Dahme, (ne Peper), and her younger sister were small children when Germany invaded Holland in 1940. Her parents owned a restaurant at the train station in Amsterdam and sold newspapers from a kiosk. The family was Jewish and was subject to all the restrictions and indignities inflicted by the Germans. In the summer of 1942, the Germans told the Jewish population that it would be moved out of the Netherlands on the excuse that the area was dissolving into a war zone. Mr. and Mrs. Peper realized that their daughters had little chance of survival if the family was put into a concentration camp and so gave the children to a sympathetic Christian family.
For the next three years, Maude and her sister were hidden by Christian families appalled at what had happened to their Jewish neighbours and friends. They were given new names and identities and were told that if the deception was discovered, they would be murdered. Maude Dahme recently told an audience that, “The Dutch got money for uncovering hidden Jews, so there was literally a price on our heads. It was a difficult time for everyone. The whole country was starving. People were freezing to death in the winter.”
By the time Holland was liberated by Canadian soldiers, the girls had forgotten their parents as well as the fact that they were Jewish. The Pepers had been hiding in the attic of Christian friends, but Maude and her sister, aged 9 and 7, respectively, did not know them when they were reunited. “We had to readjust to our parents,” Dahme recalled. After five years, the family moved to the United States.
Today, Maude Dahme is an educator and a speaker on the Holocaust. She says that: “I do it because I feel it’s a story that needs to be told and because I want to give back to this country, [the U.S.A.], which has given me so much. For a long time I couldn’t talk about my experiences. But sharing my story has helped me to become the person I am today. I’ve seen horrible atrocities, things I can’t even talk about. But I’ve also seen people, Christians, who risked their lives to save us. I’d be a miserable person if I still hated, if I hadn’t forgiven. It was important to go beyond that. I had to make a new life.”
Perhaps the most heroic thing any of us can do is to forgive.
Picture courtesy of www.njn.net/about/pressroom/hiddenchild/
