French Resistance hero who saved hundreds of Jewish children dies aged 108
Georges Loinger escaped from German camp and spent rest of the war helping children cross Swiss border
A French Resistance hero who used his ingenuity and athleticism to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish children during the second world war has died at the age of 108.
Georges Loinger, a talented athlete and cousin of the famous mime artist and fellow Resistance member Marcel Marceau, smuggled small groups of children across the Swiss border by throwing a ball and telling them to run after it.
Another ruse involved dressing children up as mourners and taking them to a cemetery whose wall abutted the French side of the border. With the help of a gravedigger’s ladder, the “mourners” clambered over the wall and headed for the border just feet away.
The children he saved, whose parents had been killed or sent to Nazi concentration camps, were under the responsibility of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, (OSE) a Jewish children’s aid society founded in St Petersburg in 1912.
France’s Holocaust Memorial Foundation said Loinger died on Friday. It described him as an “exceptional man”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/30/french-resistance-hero-saved-jewish-children-dies-georges-loinger
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