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When Émilienne Moreau-Evrard was 16 she witnessed Germany invade her home in the north of France. She said I don’t like these assholes and blew some up and shot some others. Twenty-six years later she watched those Nazis fucks do it again and said welp, back to work fucking their shit up until they get the hell out of my country.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 25, 1915--
Émilienne created an improvised school in her basement to teach the local children in their German-occupied village. On September 25, 1915, Scottish soldiers of the Black Watch infantry battalion counterattacked to retake the village for the Allies. As they were about to do so Émilienne said to them to hang on a second. We need a confab first. The Germans are located here, and here, and here, she told them. As a result of the intelligence she provided, the Scottish were able to retake the city with minimal casualties.
But then those German fuckwipes counter-counterattacked and the town was in the shit again. She saw a British soldier who was wounded and went to his aid, bringing along some grenades just in case. She used those grenades to blow up some Germans while rescuing the wounded Brit. She then transformed her house into not just a school, but a first aid station.
During the fighting two German soldiers walked by her house and she shot and killed both of them through a closed door. After that the village stayed under Allied control and she was given a shit-ton of medals.
Then, World War II. Now 42 and married with children she’d probably had enough of this German invasion bullshit, but she wasn’t going to let the fucking Nazis run around her country without a fight, so once again, she fought. Like a fucking lioness.
Émilienne became one of the highest profile members of the French Resistance, engaging in spreading propaganda, intelligence gathering, and combat operations. The fucking Nazis knew who she was and wanted her ass dead, but she narrowly escaped capture a number of times. Once it was so close the Gestapo shot at her as she fled, narrowly missing.
With the heat on, she fled to Algiers in early 1944, but returned shortly after D-Day to finish helping kick the fucking Nazis out of her country. After the war General Charles de Gaulle awarded her the Ordre de la Libération. She is one of only six women to receive such an honor.
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I love how you give "equal time" to women in these pieces. As you have time, I'd also love to read more about BIPOC heroes -- like the many Black Abolitionists in the US. We hear about Frederick Douglass (and we should), but not that there was an entire network of free Black men and women who pushed the cause. (One of my work-study jobs in undergrad was re-typing the writing and public addresses of these folks into a database for the Black Abolitionist Archive, then housed at University of Detroit/Mercy)