Josette Duval < A-Z ULTIMATE >

Today, La Maison des Revenants is a small museum dedicated to civilian resistance in WWII. The herb garden still grows. And every June 6th, someone places a single white rose on the mass grave outside town—not for the dead, who have enough flowers, but for the living who crawled out.

Simone stayed for a month. She did not write the story she intended. Instead, she wrote a long-form essay titled The Midwife of Sainte-Mère , which won the Prix Albert Londres. In it, she described Josette not as a hero or a martyr, but as a repairer . josette duval

Her most harrowing act came in June 1944. Three days after D-Day, as Allied forces pushed inland, a vengeful SS unit swept through Sainte-Mère-Église. They rounded up 27 villagers suspected of aiding the paratroopers. Josette was among them. They were marched to a field outside town, made to kneel before a ditch, and shot. Today, La Maison des Revenants is a small

Josette, then 19, did not join the armed resistance. Instead, she became something arguably more dangerous: a . Using her midwifery training, she began falsifying medical documents to exempt young Frenchmen from forced labor in Germany (the STO). She hid a Jewish infant, the child of a Parisian seamstress, in a hollowed-out confessional in the abandoned chapel on the hill. She treated wounded British paratroopers with poultices of comfrey and yarrow, lying to German patrols with a serene face that masked a heart hammering against her ribs. Simone stayed for a month