ORGANISED ESCAPES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 798, 5 November 1954, Page 14

ORGANISED ESCAPES

RENDEZ-VOUS 127, The Diary of Madame Anne Brusselmans, M.B.E., transcribed by Denis Hornsey, D.F.C.; Ernest Benn, N.Z, price 12/6. MADAME BRUSSELMANS was the last link in Belgium of the Cométe line, an underground escape organisation which was responsible for the safe return of some 180 airmen shot down over Europe during the war. On several occasions she ‘was the only link: "Why is it always the others and never me that gets caught?" she wrote in her diary in August, 1944. No doubt she was lucky, but luck without resource, wit, and daring would not have saved her from the Gestapo. She took elaborate precautions to see that she was not followed, gave none of the other agents her name or her address (although, according to her diary, a few visited her flat), planned carefully each small. detail

of her movements or of an alibi, and always had her story ready in case of trouble. e sy indeed. it seems hard to understand that a woman always so,careful should have been so foolish as to keep a diary, even though it was well hidden. In some of her rambling entries in the last months before liberation can be seen the nervous strain of four years of alarms and tensions and sleepless nights; the strain of keeping up the appearance to family and friends that all was as usual in the Brusselmans’ affairs. FlightLieutenant Hornsey, himself an escaper with the Cométe’s aid, links the diary entries and. occasionally expands them by .explaining what happened to the airmen who passed through her hands.. I for one would have liked more. detail about the work of her organisation, but

Hornsey hasn't supplied it.

W.A.

G.