Andrée de Jongh

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Andrée de Jongh (born 30 November 1916) was a member of Belgian Resistance who organized a Comet Line for escaped Allied soldiers during the World War II.

Andrée de Jongh was born 1916 in Schaerbeek, Belgium her father Frédéric de Jongh was a headmaster. When the German troops invaded Belgium in 1940 De Jongh moved to Brussels and established an escape network called the Comet Line for captured Allied soldiers with the help of her father. In August 1941 she appeared in a British consulate in Bilbao with a British soldier and two Belgia volunteers and requested support for her escape network. Request was granted and Comet Line begun.

Comet line went from Brussels to Pyrenees through France and there to British consulate in Madrid and to Gibraltar. They helped around 400 Allied soldiers and Andrée accompanied 118 of them herself.

The Gestapo captured Frédéric de Jongh in June 1943 and later executed him. Many other members of the Comet Line were also captured and 23 in all were executed. Andrée was captured in January 1944. Unwilling to believe she could have organized the network herself, Gestapo let her live. She was sent first to Fresnes prison in Paris and eventually to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was released by the advancing Allied troops in April 1945.

Andrée de Jongh was awarded the United States Medal of Freedom and the George Medal by the King George VI of the United Kingdom, and was granted the honorary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Belgian Army. After the war she moved first to the Belgian Congo and then to Ethiopia to work in a leper hospital in Addis Abeba. Later she was made a Belgian Countess.

[edit] Reference

• (French) Gubin, E., "DE JONGH, Andrée dite Dédée (1916– )" in E. Gubin, C. Jacques, V. Piette & J. Puissant (eds), Dictionnaire des femmes belges: XIXe et XXe siècles. Bruxelles: Éditions Racine, 2006. ISBN 2-87386-434-6