HUSH-HUSH
HEROES
CANADA’S SECOND WORLD WAR UNDERCOVER AGENTS
By Sharon Adams
Their feats were daring; if caught, their executions gruesome. The secret nature of their work kept their deeds veiled for years, and seven decades later, few of us can name even one of the covert combatants who risked torture and death behind enemy lines.
M
ontrealer Gustave Biéler spent the Christmas of 1943 in France. It was likely to be his last. The Nazis had launched a manhunt for him and his comrades in the French Resistance. The spy, known only by his code name Guy, wrote a few lines on the back of a photograph and handed it to his host,
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Camille Boury. “If misfortune overtakes me some day, write to this address.” His pre-war employer could contact Biéler’s wife, whose name was also kept secret, to prevent reprisals against family. “Tell her how I spent Christmas…tell her how I thought of them.” Three weeks later, the Nazis did catch him. They tortured him for information, and when he gave none, tortured him some more. For months. They beat him, broke a kneecap, nearly drowned him. Sent him to Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany where he was kept in solitary confinement in the dark, starved and beaten some more. He never gave them so much as his own name. On Sept. 9, 1944, D-Day past, Paris and Rome liberated, the Allies beginning their long slog from the Netherlands to
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