Helene Adams, 85, Hero of French Resistance

Helene Deschamps Adams, a hero of the French Resistance who saved American fliers from capture and Jews from execution by the Nazis, and played a role in secret preparations for Allied invasions of France, died in Manhattan Saturday of heart failure.When asked why she took on the dangerous role of secret agent, “she was fond of saying, ‘I didn’t like the idea of Nazis taking over my country,'” according to her daughter, Karyn Anick Monget.Helene Deschamps was born into a French military family at Tientsin, China, in 1921, and grew up in colonial outposts. Studying at a convent when Germany invaded France in 1940, she joined the Resistance. Her duties ranged from being a courier to gathering information on German troop strength, airfields and coastal installations in preparation for the Allied invasion of southern France in 1944. She rescued downed U.S.fliers before the Nazis could find them and guided groups of Jews to safety across the Spanish border in the Pyrenees mountains.Using the code name Anick, Deschamps worked as a secretary at the Vichy headquarters of the Milice, the French equivalent of the Gestapo, and was able to steal the records of hundreds of people, including Jews, Resistance members and ordinary citizens who had been marked for death or deportation to concentration camps, her daughter said.“She gained access to a huge filing cabinet,” Ms. Monget said in a telephone interview. “Every morning for several months she would pull cards, put them in her brassiere and flush the evidence down a toilet.”Always in danger of being exposed, the diminutive auburn-haired Deschamps, just over 5 feet tall, suffered a permanent back injury when beaten by a French interrogator. Another time, faced with the choice of being blown up or having her cover blown, she walked into a building where she knew a bomb had been planted. She barely escaped, bleeding and partially deafened, when it exploded.In 1946, she moved to the United States as the French war bride of an American Army lieutenant, Forest E. Adams. He died in 1951, and she never remarried.Deschamps Adams spent many years as a French teacher in Hawaii, Bermuda, Germany and Iran, among other places. In 1953, living in Los Angeles, she made local headlines when a man responding to her ad to sell her sports car turned out to be one of the downed fliers she had rescued a decade earlier. Days later, he attended her swearing-in as an American citizen.Her espionage derring-do in Nazi-occupied France became the subject of books and documentaries, and she wrote two books, “The Secret War” (1980), and and “Spyglass: The Autobiography of Helene Deschamps Adams,” in 1995. She was honored late in life by the U.S. and French governments for her wartime deeds.

Helene Adams, 85, Hero of French Resistance

Helene Adams, 85, Hero of French Resistance

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