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 " S Medal of Freedom to Odette Bouchard for assisting US and British pilots
Date : 30/04/2004
KUN0048 4 GEN 0235 KUWAIT /KUNA-GNW5 GEN-RESISTANCE-PEOPLE-MEDAL US Medal of Freedom to Odette Bouchard for assisting US and British pilots GENEVA, April 30 (KUNA) -- US Ambassador to Switzerland Pamela Pitzer Willeford presented Friday the Medal of Freedom to French-Swiss Citizen Odette Peyrot-Bouchard for assisting U.S. flyers shot down over France during the Second World War. On February 12, 1944, Madame Bouchard, then aged 19, was visiting a friend in a Paris hospital when the doors burst open and several Gestapo men arrested her and transferred her to Fresnes prison, where she found herself with many other women of the French Resistance. The next day, looking over a wall into the men's section of the prison she saw, to her horror, her father. That was the last time she ever saw him; he died (or was killed) in prison. The Gestapo then arrested her mother on March 25, 1944. She too was imprisoned in Fresnes. After D-Day, when the Nazis were being driven out of France, Madame Bouchard and her mother, along with many other women, were herded into freight cars and taken by train to the notorious Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany. There, Madame Bouchard and her mother were separated from each other and endured brutal and humiliating ill-treatment. Madame Bouchard never saw her mother again. She later found out that her mother died at the hands of the SS on September 11, 1944. (On April 22, 1945, Madame Bouchard was able to escape and on May 3, a U.S. Infantry officer helped her to cross the river Elbe to be picked up by the Allies. She was taken in hand by the British Government, decorated for her bravery and was sent to a Swiss sanatorium for a long recuperation and convalescence. During this period she was too ill to reply to a letter from the Office of the Defense Attach{ in the American Embassy in Bern, informing her that she and her parents were the recipients of the U.S. Medal of Freedom. As members of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France, Odette Peyrot-Bouchard and her parents, Charlotte and Roger Jean Bouchard, assisted many downed U.S. Air Force and British Royal Air Force aircrews to escape to freedom across France through Spain to Gibraltar, and then to England. Peyrot-Bouchard, a French/Swiss dual national who has resided in Switzerland for decades, is now 80 years old. Additional background information is provided below.(end) hn.mm KUNA 301638 Apr 04NNNN"
Son pere : GR 16 P 76608 | BOUCHARD ( Roger Jean ) | 1882-07-20 | Beaune | Côte-d'Or | FRANCE | FFc DIR
Sa mère : GR 16 P 54937 | BERTRAND épouse BOUCHARD ( Charlotte ) | 1887-03-25 | Rocroi | Ardennes | FRANCE | FFc DIR
Laurent Laloup le mercredi 06 juin 2018 Contribution au livre ouvert de Odette Antoinette Bouchard épouse Peyrot | |
