In the summer of 1944, 18-year-old Micheline Blum-Picard was busy working with a group of Resistance fighters deep behind the fighting in Normandy, but her clandestine work had begun two years before, when she was just 16.

Born in Paris in 1923, Micheline became fluent in English by going to summer language camps in Britain. In the early 30s, her father was sent as a high-up French official to Sarrebruck (Saar), and she experienced firsthand the rise of the Nazis as they began to foment unrest there. German-speaking kids would throw stones at her school bus. The Nazis would eventually blacklist her father, and they left for Paris after the 1935 plebiscite.

Image: Micheline Blum-Picard during World War II.

After the fall of France, Micheline’s first act of rebellion against the occupying forces was the student Armistice Day march on 11 November 1940, which was broken up by French police and German troops.

Her family moved to Montluçon (03100) in the safer unoccupied zone, and it was whilst at high school there that Micheline came into contact with a philosophy teacher named Pierre Kaan, who was already active in the Resistance, and this would be her entry into the ‘army of the shadows’. Kaan was arrested in late December 43 and sent to Buchenwald and then to a forced labour camp at Gleina (Czechoslovakia) – liberated there in May 45, he succumbed to typhus and exhaustion.

Kaan was in charge of communications between Lyon and the occupied zone, and Micheline would take perilous train journeys carrying messages hidden under her clothing. Another dangerous mission involved taking photos of the results of an RAF raid on the Dunlop factory at Montluçon, which was making tires for the German war effort, during the night of 16 September 1943. She also assisted in helping Allied airmen using escape lines.

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