Marie-Louise Charpentier

Marie-Louise Charpentier, also known as Lily Charpentier (1905-1998), was a nurse, social worker, and active member of the French Resistance in Brittany during World War II. Her most well known accomplishment was hiding a Jewish woman and her two grandchildren from German forces and arranging their safe passage to relatives in the south of France. For this, in 1990, she was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel. Resistance activist At the risk of her life, Charpentier worked with the Resistance in German-occupied Rennes. Her activities were known to include: distributing leaflets with the help of Dr. Menon who died in the Allied bombardment of May 1943; saving a young Polish couple from deportation; and helping young people escape compulsory labor service in by administering drugs to them just before their evaluation by German doctors. Rescue In 1943, while serving as a social worker in the Rennes office for assistance to families of prisoners of war, she received a visit from an elderly woman, Malka Engelstein, who tearfully told the story about her Jewish family, originally from Poland, who had settled in Metz in eastern France in the early 20th century. Early in World War II, her son Joseph Engelstein, who had been serving in the French army, was captured by German forces and was a prisoner of war. When Germany annexed France in 1940, the remaining family members (Mrs. Malka Engelstein, her husband Fishel, their daughter-in-law, and her two young children) fled Metz and took refuge in Rennes, western France. However, on this day in 1943, Gestapo agents appeared at their house, ransacked everything and took away the grandfather Fishel as well as her daughter-in-law, and threatened to return for the grandmother and her grandchildren. Charpentier immediately left with the grandmother to find the two young children: Catherine Engelstein, three years old, and her two-year-old brother Raymond and promptly removed them from the house. (She learned later that the Gestapo agents had returned, in vain, to take the three remaining family members.)