One of the last surviving senior French Resistance leaders, Raymond Aubrac, whose pregnant wife famously led a daring commando raid to rescue him from the Nazis, has died in Paris aged 97. Aubrac, whose parents were deported to their deaths at Auschwitz, and his wife Lucie formed the most famous couple of the French resistance that waged a brutal underground battle against the Nazis' World War II occupation.
Involved in left-wing politics since before the war, Aubrac went on to become a close friend of Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and acted as a messenger between the US and Vietnamese governments in the early 1970s. President Nicolas Sarkozy paid homage to "a heroic Resistance figure" whose "escape, thanks to the bravery of his wife Lucie Aubrac has entered into the legend of the history of the Resistance".
"These heroes of the shadows who saved France's honour at a time when it appeared lost are disappearing one after the other. It is our duty to keep their legacy alive in the heart of our collective memory," Sarkozy said in a statement. Aubrac gave his definition of resistance in 2010, during the opening of a school in his name.
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