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The photograph is striking: an elderly woman holds a faded blue-and-grey striped prison uniform -- the one she was forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps. A red triangle on the fabric marks her as a political prisoner. Her name was Andrée Peel -- born on this day in 1905 and known to the French Resistance as "Agent Rose" -- and she kept this garment for the rest of her life as a reminder of what she endured fighting for freedom. When German soldiers marched into the port city of Brest in June 1940, the 35-year-old beauty salon owner committed her first act of defiance: she hid fleeing French soldiers and found civilian clothes for them so they wouldn't be captured. Days later, when General Charles de Gaulle declared on the radio that "France has lost a battle, but she has not lost the war," Peel and her friends typed out his words and slipped copies through letterboxes across the city. Within weeks, she was leading an under-section of the Resistance. Under her code name "Agent Rose," she passed intelligence on German naval movements and troop positions to the Allies. Her most dangerous work came at night: she and her team used torches to guide Allied planes to improvised landing strips, then smuggled downed British and American pilots through a network of safe houses to remote beaches, where they escaped on submarines and gunboats. Over three years, she saved the lives of 102 Allied airmen. In 1943, when the Gestapo closed in on the Brest network, Peel fled to Paris and assumed a new identity. But shortly after D-Day, a fellow Resistance member broke under torture and revealed her location. She was arrested and taken to Gestapo headquarters, where she was stripped and interrogated. The Gestapo tortured her, using methods that included simulated drowning and beating her throat; the damage she suffered from their interrogation would cause her pain for the rest of her life. She prided herself on one thing above all: she never broke. "I was born with courage," she said. "I did not allow cruel people to find in me a person they could torture." After the Gestapo were done with her, she was transported to Ravensbrück, the notorious women's concentration camp, where she narrowly escaped death multiple times. Upon arrival, prisoners were marched into what she later realized was a gas chamber -- but for unknown reasons, they were released instead of killed. She was lucky twice more during her time at Ravensbrück: first when she fell ill with meningitis but miraculously recovered, and then when she was selected for the gas chamber during roll call, but a Polish prisoner managed to snatch and hide the paper with her number before the SS noticed. Eventually transferred to Buchenwald, Peel's final brush with death came in April 1945. As American troops approached, the Nazis prepared to eliminate evidence of their crimes -- including the prisoners. Lined up against a wall with other inmates, Peel watched the firing squad take position. Then a telephone rang in the commandant's office. It was a message from the Americans: the firing squad had been seen entering the camp. If they wanted to live, they would spare the prisoners. The soldiers fled. On April 11, 1945, tanks from the American Third Army rolled through Buchenwald. Andrée Peel was free. After the war, she returned to Paris, where crowds welcomed her singing La Marseillaise. She fulfilled a promise made in captivity by making a pilgrimage to Sacré-Cœur to give thanks for her survival. She became one of the most decorated women to survive the war, receiving the Croix de Guerre, the Medal of the Resistance, the Liberation Cross, and -- at age 99 -- France's highest honor, the Légion d'honneur, presented by her own brother, a four-star general. She received the Medal of Freedom from President Eisenhower and a personal letter of thanks from Winston Churchill. © Reddit #drthehistories