Edith Piaf, superspy

Marilyn sez, "The Germans loved Edith Piaf so much they let her travel freely in occupied France, and even let her sing for French P.O.W.s. She staged photo ops with the prisoners and later had the pix made into passport photos which she smuggled into the camp during a return visit."

During that visit, says Piaf's sister-in-law Christie Laume, the "Little Sparrow" gained permission to have her picture taken with the prisoners. Piaf returned to France with the photos of the prisoners and, with the help of some unknown Resistance members, quickly had the images enlarged and used for passports. Within weeks, Piaf returned to perform at the camp again, smuggling these passports to the prisoners. Laume could not say exactly how the scheme was hatched, or how the passports were used. It seems Piaf took more than one secret to the grave with her. That being said, Piaf did explain to Laume why she risked her life to save others.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

(Image: La vie en Melrose, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from Numberstumper's Flickr stream)

[#1 posted by Kit10inDublin , February 19, 2008 2:03 AM]

My initial knowledge of Edith Piaf stems from a school show performed by one of the pupils doing an excellent impersonation of Edith's voice. Pretty cool for a Catholic girls school in Dublin more than 20 years ago. Since then I've had a fascination & respect for her & her music.

So when this actually recently it shocked me a little (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIf8BBdr1Sk). If the French know about this they'd be horrified. Dead people 'selling' stuff isn't new but still.

[#2 posted by Alys , February 19, 2008 2:51 PM]

@ Kit: That advert was really dreadful.

I was aware of her work with the French resistance, but I don't think it was ever covered in her autobiography, or in recent films (La Mome).