The New York Times made my day today.
Not only for the superb coverage of the disgraced governor of New York, but for an amazing piece by Douglas Martin.
If you have any doubt about why obituaries are one of the most-read sections of any newspaper, read this one about a 93-year-old lady who was a British resistance fighter opposing the Nazis in France.
Today’s New York Times remembers her with this memorable obituary.
Some excerpts:
Pearl Cornioley, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied France to work as a courier between the British and the French resistance and rose to command 3,000 underground fighters, died on Feb. 24 in the Loire Valley of France.
Ms. Cornioley, who was 29 when she was sent to France in 1943, commanded troops who killed 1,000 German soldiers and wounded many more — while suffering only a tiny number of casualties themselves.
She presided over the surrender of 18,000 German troops.
Her unit interrupted a railway line that connected the south of France to Normandy more than 800 times in June 1944, the month of D-Day.
It also regularly attacked German convoys.
The Germans offered a million-franc reward for her capture.
Pearl Witherington, as she was known at the time of her wartime exploits, was British by birth and French by upbringing. Her code name was Wrestler, her nom de guerre was Pauline, and in wireless transmissions to Britain, she was “Marie.”
‘The girls who served as secret agents in Churchill’s Special Operations Executive were young, beautiful and brave,” Marcus Binney wrote in his book “The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Agents of the Special Operations Executive” (2002).
“At a time when women in the armed forces were restricted to a strictly noncombatant role in warfare, the women of S.O.E. trained and served alongside the men,” he continued. “They fought not in the front line but well behind it.”
Cecile Pearl Witherington was born in Paris on June 24, 1914.
A great-grandfather was a chemist who introduced the recipe for Worcestershire sauce to Lea & Perrins, and a grandfather was an architect in London.
Her father traveled the world for a Swedish company that supplied paper for banknotes.
Her father’s heavy drinking and spendthrift habits shattered the family, obituaries in British newspapers said.
As the eldest of four daughters, Ms. Cornioley started working at 17 as a secretary and made extra money by teaching English at night.
She burned with anger over France’s defeat and began searching for a way to fight back.
Luckily, her French was superb.
“And anyway I didn’t like the Germans,” she was quoted as saying in an obituary in The Independent.
“Never did. I’m a baby of the 1914-18 war.”
On the night of Sept. 22-23, she parachuted into France, near Châteauroux. Her two suitcases landed in a lake, where they were lost.
Within hours, she was reunited with her French fiancé, Henri Cornioley, who had escaped from a German prison camp and joined the resistance.
But in October 1944, after being separated and almost killed, the couple made it to London, where they married.
They moved to Paris, where Mr. Cornioley worked as a pharmacist and Ms. Cornioley as a secretary for the World Bank.
In 1995, Ms. Cornioley published her memoirs, which she wrote with Hervé Larroque.
One tale concerned a “really cute” rabbit she took everywhere with her.
The rabbit was oblivious to machine-gun fire.
Ms. Cornioley received many honors, but the one that stuck in her mind was the one she turned down.
That was Member of the British Empire, or M.B.E. She had been offered the civil version, not the military one.
She sent an icy note saying she had had done nothing remotely “civil.”
What a lady!
And what a great photo!
(Photo by Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse, Getty Images in 2006)