Countess Andree De Jongh, 90, who set up an escape route that helped hundreds of British airmen flee the Nazi occupation of Belgium during World War II, has died. De Jongh died Saturday, a former resistance organization said. No cause of death was given.
De Jongh, a nurse in a men’s world of war resistance, helped found the Comet Line escape route while still in her 20s. After her arrest in 1943, she survived German camps before being liberated at the end of the war.
The escape route was set up in 1940 to allow downed British airmen to return home and escape German imprisonment. The route went through Belgium, occupied France and over the Pyrenees into Spain.
“We accepted that we could be arrested. It was our job,” she said years ago. “We didn’t say ‘if we get arrested,’ we said ‘when we get arrested.”‘
By the time she was arrested, she had brought 118 people, including 80 downed pilots, to safety.
De Jongh was made a countess in 1985.
Alfred Russell, 87, a New York School painter who abandoned abstraction for a classicizing, Surrealistic figurative style, died in New York on Sept. 22 of complications of cancer, said his wife, Joan Russell.
During the late 1940s and early ’50s, Russell was active in abstract circles in New York and Paris. His finely structured images, in which small planes seemed to splinter around a central vortex, combined aspects of the abstract styles of both cities.
In New York, he had solo shows at the Peridot Gallery and appeared in seven painting annuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in early Abstract Expressionist group shows at the Sidney Janis Gallery and the Kootz Gallery.
Bob Denard, 78, a mercenary who staged coups, battled communism and fought for French interests and his own across Africa for more than three decades, has died, his sister said Sunday.
Denard died Saturday in the Paris area, said his sister, Georgette Garnier. She declined to say how he died, but he had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular problems.
A fervent anti-communist who had worked for several dictators and monarchs, Denard was among a group of post-colonial French mercenaries known as “les affreux” – the horrible ones. He claimed he had the backing of Paris but was never given official support.
Bob Denard was one of about a dozen aliases that he assumed during his colorful career. His real name was Gilbert Bourgeaud.
