Yvonne Claire Rudellat
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Yvonne Claire Rudellat (January 1897-April 1945) was a member of the French Resistance during the German occupation of France during World War II.
[edit] Early life
Rudellat was born in January of 1897, the youngest of ten children, most of whom died in infancy. She was the daughter of a horse dealer for the French army, and when her domineering mother would allow it, Yvonne accompanied him on buying trips. After his death, Yvonne found herself unable to live with her mother anymore, and moved to London to get a job. While working at a chain store in Regent Street, she met a waiter from the Piccadilly Hotel, and the two were married in 1920. Alex Rudellat was nine years older than his eighteen year old bride, and had once been an undercover agent. In 1922, Yvonne gave birth to a baby girl and named her Constance Jacqueline. When the child was seven, Yvonne and Alex separated, but were friends, and shared time with their daughter.
[edit] Career in the French Resistance
Ten days after the declaration of war in 1939, Yvonne's seventeen year old daughter joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and later married a sergeant. Yvonne tried several times to join her daughter in the ATS, but was turned down because of her age. In 1942, at the age of forty-five, Yvonne was finally accepted and selected to train for the SOE, though no woman had ever been chosen as a leader, though many had proven themselves. She left England for Gibraltar under the codename Jacqueline and, after months of training, became the first woman SOE to be sent abroad. She traveled to France by boat in terrible weather, and set up a resistance group around the chateau of the Loire. She and her partner, Pierre Culioli, controlled the group together, and carried out many successful operations against German-operated train lines and factories.
With suspicions mounting, the two were openly pursued by German forces. Pierre and Yvonne were trying to escape arrest in a car when a bullet hit her in the back of her head, knocking her unconscious. Pierre saw the amount of blood coming from the wound, and since Yvonne was unresponsive, he decided to kill himself rather than be taken and tortured. He slammed the vehicle into a ditch and then the side of a cottage, but the two woke up in a hospital at Blois hours later. Yvonne was told that her injury wasn't life threatening, and that the bullet hadn't pierced her brain, but that it would be unsafe to remove it. She was taken to Ravensbruck, on the same transport as another female resistance heroine, Odette Sansom.
[edit] Imprisonment
During World War II, over 8,000 Frenchwomen were sent to prison camps in Germany, and only 800 returned to France. In February of 1945, 2500 elderly and ill women were sent from Ravensbruck to what they thought would be a 'convalescent camp,' but what was actually Belsen. Yvonne, who had refused to give the German authorities her real name and would only be recorded as "Jacqueline," was among the women sent to Belsen. She died there after a long illness in late April of 1945, and was buried in a mass grave. Today, she is commemorated by an obelisk at Romorantin in the Loire Valley, and by a plaque at the Valençay SOE Memorial, where her name is included in the Valençay Memorial Roll of Honor, along with 91 men and 12 other women who died for their country.
