the times | Wednesday December 2 2020 1GM 53
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reader who kept a diary written in a
mixture of English, French and short-
hand, which might have been difficult
to explain had it ever been found by
the Germans.
On Wednesday, October 15, 1941, she
records details of her first assignment
with Allied evaders. “I have a train at
12.24... I am in splendid form, I feel the
bones of my haunch, I have no belly,
nervous legs. I did the way very quickly
without tiredness.”
The next day she picks up the airmen,
referred to as Bobby and Allan, who
arrive at 10.45. Later, someone gives her
a copy of Little Women, which she reads
“alone on the bed with a glass of gin
beside me”. The airmen leave for the
Pyrenees the next day. “I hope I shall
get stronger,” she writes.
At the same time RAF Bomber
Command was increasing the number
of sorties its aircraft were flying against
enemy targets, but the German defences
were also taking a heavy toll on the
British bomber force. More and more
downed airmen were trying to evade
German security forces.
One of these was Sergeant Bob Frost,
a gunner serving with No 150 Squadron,
flying Vickers Wellingtons from RAF
Snaith in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
Frost had baled out of his bomber over
Belgium in 1942 after it was hit by anti-
aircraft fire during a raid on Essen. Hewas given shelter by a farming family in
the village of Kapellen bij Glabbeek and
then passed on to the Comet Line in
Brussels, where he was reunited with
two other members of his crew before
being taken to Paris.
In an interview in 2016, Frost recalled
meeting Janine de Greef, who took him
and five other airmen from Paris south-
west to St Jean de Luz. “She made that
journey from Paris twenty-odd times
during the war,” he said. “A real heroine,
that girl!”
When an older woman got on the
train during the journey south, one of
the airmen, an American, apparently
offered her his seat, but did so in English.
Frost said he was afraid and looked at
De Greef. “She didn’t bat an eyelash,” he
said.
Like Janine, the rest of her family also
appeared to have strong nerves. Her
indomitable mother disguised her
resistance activities through her
involvement in the black market, which
thrived on the Spanish frontier. She
even counted a number of German
officers among her customers. Fernand,
codenamed Oncle Dick, got a job as a
translator with the German occupiers
and was able to steal documents and ID
cards, which Freddy helped to copy and
forge.
Johnson, codenamed Be, also re-
mained with the family. Ostensibly ahandyman, he guided many evaders
across the Pyrenees.
Quite remarkably, the entire family
survived the war without ever being
arrested. Of the 3,000 civilians who
helped the Comet Line, about 700 were
taken by Nazi security forces during the
course of the war, including Andrée de
Jongh. She was sent to Ravensbrück
concentration camp in 1943, but
survived and was awarded the George
Medal by the British. Others were not
so lucky; more than 250 were executed
or died in the camps.
Elvire de Greef was also awarded the
George Medal. Janine received the
King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause
of Freedom. Her citation outlined the
many occasions on which she had
shepherded evaders to the Spanish
frontier. “In all her work for the Allied
Cause,” it said, “Mademoiselle Janinede Greef proved herself to be a most
courageous, loyal and patriotic helper.”
Janine Lambertine Marie Angele de
Greef was born in Brussels in 1925 into
a middle-class family. Her father was a
businessman. Aged 15, she was still at
school in the Belgian capital when
German forces invaded the country.
After the Nazi surrender, she was
decorated by the Belgian government
and the United States as well as the
British. She returned to the family
home at 424 Avenue de la Couronne in
Brussels and was employed by the British
embassy as a commercial attaché.
Described as a spiritual person, she
developed a broad interest in all
religions. She was regarded as kind and
charitable and used to feed the stray
cats in her neighbourhood with the
finest fillet steak. She loved to travel
and built up a collection of photographs
from around the world.
Discouraged by her mother, Janine
never married or had children, but was
secretive about her relationships. Her
surviving family believe she had an
affair with Johnson during the war, and
that photographs point to a relation-
ship with an RAF officer in 1945.
She moved into her mother’s down-
stairs flat after Elvire’s death in 1991, but
the building was later damaged by fire
and her medals were stolen. Undeterred,
she continued to live in the derelict
building — far worse things happened
during the Second World War, she said
— until it was refurbished.
In Brussels she often attended the
annual reunion of the Comet Line and
a Requiem Mass for those who died in
its service. According to Helen Fry,
author of a new book on MI9, Janine
de Greef had been a key figure in an
“indispensable civilian secret army”.
Sitting next to the former Wellington
gunner Bob Frost at the 2010 reunion,
she just shrugged when asked how she
had managed to have such presence of
mind at such a young age. “You had to
live,” she said, “and not worry.”Janine de Greef, Comet Line member,
was born on September 25, 1925. She
died on November 7, 2020, aged 95‘She made the journey
from Paris twenty-odd
times during the war’
Obituaries
Rare female voice
of the Beat Generation
Diane di Prima
Page 54
Janine de Greef
Courageous Belgian who helped to set up the secret Comet Line as a teenager, enabling RAF crews to evade capture after being shot down
De Greef in her thirties and, left, with her brother, Freddy, and her mother, Elvire,
with whom she fled over the Pyrenees as the Gestapo closed in on them in 1944As Allied troops landed on the beaches
of Normandy on the morning of June 6,
1944, a courageous teenager in southern
France set out on a journey that would
end her own epic struggle against the
Nazis.
Janine de Greef, a vibrant Belgian of
19, was one of the founding members of
the Comet Line, a secret army operating
in Brussels, Paris and Bayonne that
enabled nearly 800 Allied airmen to
evade German security forces and
return to Britain after they were shot
down over occupied Europe.
That morning, she headed for the
Pyrenees with her mother, Elvire, her
brother, Freddy, and Micheline Dumon
(obituary, November 24, 2017), who was
then head of the northern section of the
Comet Line. Taking a route the De
Greefs had travelled many times with
Allied airmen, they were now on the
run, their lives in danger, trying to reach
neutral Spain.
Farther north, the Gestapo had
arrested several of the escape line’s key
helpers, and it was finally closing in on
Comet Sud, the southern section,
which had been run by the De Greef
family for three years.
After crossing the Bidasoa river and
trekking through the Pyrenees, the
party eventually reached the Basque
city of San Sebastian. There, they were
met by staff from the British embassy in
Madrid and a secret agent known as
Monday, who was from MI9, the intelli-
gence agency responsible for escape
and evasion. Janine de Greef was, at
last, in safe hands, and would be in
London within the week.
She had left her home in Brussels
in May 1940 when the Germans
invaded the Netherlands and Belgi-
um. She joined a convoy of cars
carrying the staff of the newspaper
L’Indépendance Belge, for which her
mother had worked, along with her
father, Fernand, Freddy, her grand-
mother Bobonne, and an English-
man called Albert Johnson, who had
been a chauffeur in Brussels. They
hoped to catch a ship to the United
States or to England.
Instead, they reached the seaside
town of Biarritz on the southwestern
coast of France, where they rented
the Villa Voisin, a tidy, detached
house with a garden at the end of a
discreet cul-de-sac in the village of
Anglet. Years after the war, a small
marble plaque was placed on a gate
post acknowledging the building’s
significance to the Comet Line.
The organisation was started in 1941
when its most prominent members
included Andrée de Jongh (obituary,
October 15, 2007), and Elvire de Greef
and her family. De Jongh, given the
codename Dedee, was a nurse inspired
by the exploits of Edith Cavell, who was
executed during the First World War
for helping Allied soldiers to escape
from Belgium.
Working with her father, Frederic de
Jongh, and others, Dedee helped to set
up the Comet Line in Brussels and es-
tablish links with Paris. Elvire de Greef,
known as Tante-Go, opened up escape
routes over the Pyrenees, set up safe
houses, recruited guides and forged
links with British agents and officials in
Spain. The two women often worked
together, and their codenames became
the stuff of folklore. Indeed, women
played prominent roles in most of the
escape lines; they were usually young,
charismatic and quite exceptional.
According to the historian MRD Foot,
who documented the work of MI9:
“Evaders often found that they had to
trust themselves entirely to women,
and without the courage and devotion
of its couriers and safe-house keepers,
nearly all of them women, no escape
line could keep going at all.”
He added: “There was a tremendous
readiness to help the Allied cause in
that originally small but uncommonly
tough segment of the newly conquered
populations which refused to accept
the fact of defeat.”
Janine de Greef was a complex
character. Discreet and unassuming, she
was also often too generous for her own
good. She was a serious and voraciousD
w