Gille Janine (Boitard)

Gille-Boitard, Janine Janine (née Boitard) Gille was 36 years old in 1943 and lived in Caen (Calvados). The daughter of a wine merchant, she worked as a secretary to a lawyer named Léonard Gille, assistant to the military head of the Armée Secrète in Normandy. Janine became his liaison officer, and later his wife. An important figure in the Calvados Resistance, Janine Gille proved invaluable at providing information, hiding Allied aviators and helping evaders get to London. Her actions were immortalized in Cornelius Ryan’s book, and later the film, The Longest Day. In October 1943, the police carried out a raid on the Jews of Caen and arrested Mrs. Tresser and her two daughters Guina, 6, and Jeannette, 4, who lived on the same street as Janine. Mr. Tresser was already a prisoner of war in Germany. The police gathered the detainees at the town prison pending deportation. The prison authorities refused to keep the two young girls, however, on the pretext that conditions there were not suitable for children. They were thus placed in the Caen orphanage. The police promised to return the following day to transfer them to Drancy with their mother. On her way home from work, Janine learned of the tragic events that had occurred on her street and went looking for her Jewish neighbors. Having discovered where Guina and Jeannette were located, she took them away in the middle of the night and found them shelter in a convent between Caen and Lisieux. A few days later, she took them from the convent to Lisieux, where a family of elderly farmers accommodated them until the Liberation. Janine promised the farmers a small sum of money, to be drawn from Resistance funds, and visited regularly by bicycle. To Jeannette, each of Janine’s visits was regarded as the appearance of “the beautiful blonde fairy.” Janine also welcomed Mrs. Tresser at the train station upon her return from Bergen-Belsen. On May 7, 2001, Yad Vashem recognized Janine Boitard-Gille as Righteous Among theNations.