Aubrac, Lucie 1912-2007

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 29, 1912, in Mâcon, Burgundy, France; died March 14, 2007, in Paris, France. Educator and author. Aubrac was best known for her autobiographical book Outwitting the Gestapo, which was based on her adventures with the French Resistance during World War II. A teacher who had graduated from the Sorbonne in 1938, she met her future husband, Raymond Samuel, in France after his return from studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They soon fell in love and married the next year. By then, the war had started, and after France's fall to the Nazis her husband changed his name to Aubrac to disguise his Jewish ancestry. Husband and wife both joined the Resistance in 1940, and her husband was arrested for his activities. Aubrac herself helped with propaganda and the delivery of messages for the Resistance while still working as a teacher publicly. In her Ils partiront dans l'ivresse: Lyon, mai 43, Londres, febrier 44 (1984), which was translated in 1993 as Outwitting the Gestapo, she describes her complicated yet successful attempt to rescue her husband from the hands of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo officer known as the Butcher of Lyon. Aubrac's romance with her husband and dangerous missions against the Gestapo would later inspire the movies Army of Shadows (1969) and Boulevard of Swallows (1991); her book was adapted in 1997 as the film Lucie Aubrac. That year historian Gérard Chauvy published a book accusing the Aubracs of being double agents who actually helped get French Resistance leader Jean Moulin captured and killed. The Aubracs successfully sued Chauvy and were thus vindicated. Awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government for her brave service, Aubrac spent her later years as a public speaker and political activist, protesting especially against French actions in Algeria. More recently, she was the author of The Resistance Explained to My Granchildren (2000).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Aubrac, Lucie, Outwitting the Gestapo, University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, March 16, 2007, Section 3, p. 6.

Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2007, p. B9.

New York Times, March 18, 2007, p. A27.

Washington Post, March 16, 2007, p. B7.