Elsie Maréchal
1924-2022
At sixteen, Elsie Maréchal joined the resistance and helped Allied pilots escape via the Comet Line. She was arrested, brutally beaten by the Gestapo, and survived three years in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
At the age of sixteen, Elsie Maréchal—together with her British mother, Elsie Bell, and her father, Georges Maréchal—became involved in the Belgian resistance against the Nazi occupiers. The family played a crucial role in the Comet escape line, which helped downed Allied pilots go into hiding and travel through France to safety in Spain and then to Britain.
Mother and daughter spoke fluent English, which made it easier to communicate with the British airmen they sheltered and guided. In November 1942, the family was betrayed and arrested. Georges Maréchal was executed on 20 October 1943.
In a secret prison in Brussels, reportedly beneath a portrait of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring, Elsie was brutally beaten with batons and interrogated for hours by Gestapo agents. She and her mother were deported as Nacht und Nebel prisoners to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, where around 50,000 women perished. Despite the horrific conditions, both mother and daughter survived their three-year imprisonment. They were liberated in April 1945.
Once they regained their strength, they returned to Belgium.
Elsie Maréchal passed away in 2022, at the age of 96.
Sources:
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Keswick Hall College of Education: https://www.keswickhallcollege.co.uk/Former-student-Elsie-Marechal/
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Helen Fry, MI9: A History of the Secret Service for Escape and Evasion in World War Two, Yale University Press, 2020.