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, reports The Guardian.
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”.
Loinger was born in Strasbourg in 1910. In 1940, while serving with the French army, he was taken prisoner by German forces and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. Due to his blond hair and blue eyes, his captors did not suspect that he was Jewish and he managed to escape and return to France and join the OSE.
Between April 1943 and June 1944, OSE workers and other rescuers helped hundreds of children escape to Switzerland across the lightly guarded border. Loinger alone is credited with saving at least 350 children. He was awarded the Resistance Medal, the Military Cross and the Legion of Honour.
Recalling his wartime efforts in an interview published this year, Loinger said he would train the children to run before telling them they were going to play ball near the border.
“I threw the ball 100 metres toward the Swiss border and told the children to run and get the ball. They ran after the ball and this is how they crossed,” he told Tablet magazine.