ANDREE DE JONGH
Imagine….
You’re a 24 year old Belgian wisp of a girl with a glittering design future ahead of you.
Suddenly your whole world is turned upside down… literally. The country you love is steamrollered into oblivion by the most powerful military force the world has ever known.
What do you do?
Do you hide? Do you keep quiet and wait till they go away? Do you collaborate? Or do you take on the whole might of the Nazi system and outsmart them?
If you are Dedee De Jongh , in 1940, that’s exactly what you do.
You enlist your family. Your friends. Find patriots. You plan routes. Swim across raging rivers. Climb towering mountains. Dodge bullets. Risk every sinew of your body, heart and soul. You ignore pain. Scorn illness. You deny yourself the chance of a relationship with the one man you will ever love.
All this to create and sustain an escape route for downed airmen which runs a thousand miles from your home in Brussels, through occupied France and over the awesome Pyrenees to the sanctuary of Spain.
Your Comet Line repatriates over 800 airmen in the course of the war. But over a hundred of your comrades die. You are captured and tortured by the Gestapo. The two men you care about most in the world are killed.
Despite everything, you survive. And you wonder whether the price was worth paying . But you know deep down you had to do it. It was your destiny. You were put on Earth to fight for freedom.
And you did.
That’s Dédée’s story.
This is her film.
