^{Credit: ZIV AMAR}

Marthe Cohn, a French Jewish woman who served as a spy for the Allied forces against the Nazi regime, has died at the age of 105 on Tuesday. 

She died at her home in California. Her surviving husband did not share her cause of death. 

She was credited with saving countless lives of Allied soldiers beyond enemy lines in World War II.

Cohn received the Croix de Guerre, the Médaille Militaire, and was named a knight in the Legion of Honor, France's highest order of merit. 

Cohn was born Marthe Hoffnung to a family of seven children in Metz, a city close to the German border, on April 13, 1920. Because of her proximity to the border, she learned German as a child. 

Her family was Orthodox, and aided Jews escaping from Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938. They moved to Pontiers, on the other side of the country, at the outbreak of the war. In Pontiers, Cohn worked at the city hall with German officials. When authorities began imposing restrictions, a colleague from the city hall provided her family with false papers not stamped with the word “Jew,” which allowed them to move freely to the unoccupied part of France. 

Only her sister Stephanie was arrested before the family could leave. 

She noted in her 2002 memoir, Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany that “never for one moment did I think that the same thing would happen to us. Not in France. … I believed in human nature. I still had confidence that good would prevail.”

Cohn spent the last 25 years recounting her story to students at schools and at community centers across Europe and the US. 

In her later years, she served as a memory-keeper for the Holocaust and the French Resistance, after working as a nurse.

"I will bear witness until my last breath,” she often told her audiences. 

In Cohn’s teenage years, she occasionally got into fights at school with antisemitic Catholic classmates.

Cohn's start as a spy

While Cohn was in Marseille for part of the war studying to be a nurse, she enlisted in the French military in 1944 after Paris was liberated. Military officials initially told her that she didn’t belong in the army because of her small stature, standing at just 4-feet-11-inches tall. However, after her insistence, officials permitted her to enlist as an aid worker for soldiers near the front lines. 

When the French military learned she knew German, they enlisted Cohn as a spy. She attempted a dozen times to cross into German territory before she finally succeeded on her thirteenth attempt without being detected by crossing through a field with a suitcase and a picture of a German prisoner of war, whom she claimed was her fiancé. She used this photo to gain the trust of German soldiers by asking them if they had seen him in battle.  

During her time as a spy, she was able to provide the French military with information on German positions and contributed to several notable victories.

In a documentary made about her in 2019, Chichinette: The Accidental Spy, she said that her message for people today is to “Be engaged. And don’t accept any order that your conscience could not approve.”

Source: The Jerusalem Post