Andrée Jacob

Andrée Jacob (22 July 1906 - 6 February 2002) was a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Initially working in publishing, she played an active part in the French Resistance during the Second World War. Post war she became a journalist for the newspaper Le Monde, and worked to preserve Parisian cultural heritage. She was the partner of fellow Resistance member Éveline Garnier and the cousin of the artist Max Jacob. Andrée Madeleine Jacob was born on 22 July 1906 in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris into a family of shopkeepers who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in the previous generation. Her cousin was the artist Max Jacob who himself later converted to Catholicism. She met her life partner, Éveline Garnier, through the Catholic circles which revolved around the latter's uncle, the philosopher Jacques Maritain. Jacob worked as a civil servant at the Palais de Chaillot Museum. Following the Fall of France in the Second World War, Jacobs lived under an assumed name, Marie-Thérèse Bourdon, to avoid having to wear the yellow star and the anti-semitic persecution, deportation and murder which people with Jewish ancestry suffered under the Vichy Regime. Members of her extended family were arrested, imprisoned and deported to concentration camps. Her cousins Gaston and Myrthe-Lea Jacob were arrested in January 1944, and deported to Auschwitz concentration camp and their brother Max Jacob died in Drancy internment camp in March 1944. Jacob managed to smuggle her parents out of Paris into the Free French zone, where they were able to live in the home of Éveline Garnie's family. Jacob helped to save Jews from The Holocaust in France and was very active in the NAP (Noyautage des administrations publiques) network, an arm of the French Resistance which aimed to infiltrate the Vichy Government. NAP was based at the Palais de Chaillot, where she worked and Jacob played an active role in its undertakings. Of the 14 people in the original NAP network, only four escaped the Gestapo, Andrée Jacob (codename Danielle) and Éveline Garnie (codename Anne) were among them.