Take a quick glance at Ginette Hendry’s life story and you’d think she should be sharing a drink with Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine at the Café Americain.
Before she was old enough to drive a car, she was running guns to the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. She went on to work with the French Resistance, help France’s persecuted Jews and spend years toiling in a Nazi work camp, all before turning 25.
Not that you’d hear about it from her. The kindly Berkeley grandmother with a fondness for dogs wasn’t quick to talk about her harrowing past. But her two sons gleaned bits and pieces over the years before Hendry’s death late last month after a long battle with cancer. She was 84.
“I’ve seen people imply she’d done something heroic and she put up with it, but she’d just turn away from that,” recalled her younger son, Richard, an Oakland resident.
“One time I talked to her about reparations for people put in forced labor camps that German companies were going to pay and her only answer to that was, ‘They can keep their money.’ She wouldn’t touch a penny.”
Ginette Pean was born in Paris in 1922 in a lower-middle-class household, the daughter of a building trade union organizer. It was a left-wing household through and through. She was cooking beans for striking Parisian workers when she was a young child.
When she was 15, she and other members of the Falcon Rouge (Red Falcon) socialist youth group traveled to the south of France to aid the Spanish Republicans. A fake ambulance smuggled guns over the Pyrenees into Spain, and smuggled Spanish orphans back into France. When the smugglers discovered Hendry was only 15, however, she was sent home to Paris.
She went to work at the nation’s socialist party headquarters until the building was burned to the ground by fascists.
When the Nazis invaded France, Hendry began aiding the French Resistance and hawking goods on the black market to make ends meet. A friend had appropriated a trainload of rubber heels, and Hendry sold the heels illegally, along with a partner who sold shoe glue.
Hendry signed her name to numerous leases for apartments all over Paris. These became Resistance safe houses where Jews and other enemies of the Nazis were hidden before being smuggled out of the country.
“What’s remarkable is that the French working class in the ’30s had a lot of anti-Semitic elements in it. And she was a person who came from where she came from and received the opinions of the people around her. But when the Nazis came in, she did the right thing, and that included helping Jews and helping anyone,” said Richard Hendry.
“When the Nazis showed up, there was never any question. It was not possible for her to make a compromise and live with them. The idea of a super-race, to her, it was just disgusting.”
Hendry was eventually captured by the Gestapo and spent a large portion of the war putting together wings in an airplane factory. Even after the war turned sour for the Nazis, the factory bosses stubbornly insisted Hendry and others keep making wings though there were no airplanes to rivet them to. The useless wings were wheeled out into a field and left to rust.
At one point, Hendry put a rivet through her hand in hopes of getting out of hard labor, but a Nazi doctor bandaged her up and sent her back to work.
Subsisting on a diet of potato peels, Hendry and others risked death during Allied bombardments by foraging while the Germans hid in their bomb shelters.
“I still have a knife she used to cut dandelions in the field to make salads. I can just see her crawling around during a bombardment, cutting dandelions and catching chickens,” Richard Hendry said.
When the Nazis ran off, the slave laborers discovered a huge cache of schnapps, which they used to wash pots and pans. But when American troops drove through the front gate, grateful laborers handed them jugs of what they took to be water and gulped down.
One of those soldiers was Duncan Hendry, who would fall in love with and marry Ginette — after the schnapps wore off.
“My father said he took four days before he crawled out from under his truck,” said Richard Hendry, with a laugh.
The Hendrys lived in the Bay Area for most of the last 50 years. Duncan died in the early 1990s.
Ginette Hendry is survived by sons Richard of Oakland and Robert, a farmer in Delta Junction, Alaska; three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Charitable donations in her memory can be made to the Women’s Cancer Resource Center, 5741 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, 94609.