From WOODTV
Marthe Cohn wasn’t vocal about her experience as a Jewish French spy in Nazi Germany until many years after World War II.
But more than 70 years later, she tells her story often. The now-95-year-old, who has been hailed as a hero, spoke earlier this week to a packed house at Temple Emanuel, a synagogue in Grand Rapids.
As a beautiful 20-year-old, Cohn lived in France, just across the border from Germany as Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s.
“So many people risked their lives to save others,” said Cohn — including her own family, which helped shelter Jews fleeing Nazi occupation.
But then Nazi power escalated and her family fled south. Her sister was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. She never came back.
Cohn fought back by joining the French army after the Allies liberated Paris in August 1944. She managed to avoid deportation or a concentration camp by hiding her identity as a Jew.
“Any male would’ve been immediately noticed and arrested. They needed women to go into mission and he asked me if I accepted to be transferred to the intelligence service of the French army,” Cohn said.
She accepted the challenge and became instrumental in retrieving inside information about Nazi movements.
Blonde and fluent in German, she posed as a nurse who was anxiously trying to contact her fake fiance in order to obtain crucial intelligence, relaying it to Allied forces.
That work shielded her from the reality of what was happening to her fellow Jews.
“I met survivors (of the concentration camps) and when they told me what happened. I didn’t believe them. I thought they were escaped from a psychiatric hospital. I couldn’t believe it. It was unbelievable,” she recalled.
But sharing her truth, she says, is vital to preserve history and to make sure such an atrocity never happens again.
“We (People who lived through World War II) are all dying out. We won’t be here much longer and mostly the young generation have to know what happened,” Cohn said.
When Cohn was 80, she was awarded France’s highest military honor, the Medaille Militaire.
These days, she and her husband of nearly 60 years travel often to share her story.