Born and raised in a farming family in the south of France, Anne Marie Guillot was thirty-four years old and married, but childless, at the outbreak of war in 1939.
Anne Marie spent the war years in Sainte-Bazeille, where she and her husband ran a general store. Their location was in the unoccupied Free Zone, but very close to the Demarcation Line of the German Occupied Zone. Like her husband, Anne Marie volunteered to work for the French Résistance. The special mission of her group was to rescue Jews and others who were fleeing Nazi persecution.
Beginning in 1942, until the liberation of France in 1945, Anne Marie’s efforts saved the lives of nine Jewish people: the Chief Rabbi of Bordeaux, his wife and three children, and four other children that the Rabbi had been protecting.
