82 years ago today, on August 15, 1944, a 35-year-old Greek woman named Hélène Vagliano was executed on the outskirts of...

82 years ago today, on August 15, 1944, a 35-year-old Greek woman named Hélène Vagliano was executed on the outskirts of Cannes, alongside 23 fellow prisoners, just hours before Allied forces entered the city and liberated it. Vagliano was born in Paris in 1909 to a wealthy Kefalonian shipping family. She grew up between England and the French Riviera, spoke French and English fluently, played piano, and lived the kind of privileged life that gave her no obvious reason to risk everything. When Germany occupied France in 1940, she joined the French Maquis resistance network in the Cannes area and quickly rose to a leadership role. The Gestapo caught up with her on July 28, 1944. French collaborators working under Jacques Doriot's pro-Nazi militia carried out the arrest. Her parents were taken the same day to pressure her into betraying her comrades in the resistance. For 18 days, she was subjected to torture at the local Gestapo headquarters. She gave up nothing. On the feast of the Dormition of the Virgin, with Allied troops hours from the city gates, the Germans executed her outside Cannes along with 23 others. Newspapers of the time called her the new Joan of Arc. The French government awarded her the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre posthumously. A street in Cannes still bears her name, rue Hélène Vagliano. She is buried in the crypt of the Russian Orthodox Church of Archangel Michael in Cannes, where a memorial service is held every August 15 in her memory. A commemorative plaque in her honor was unveiled in 2002 at the town hall of Leivathous in Kefalonia, the ancestral home of the Vagliano family. #Greece #WWII #FrenchResistance