Vagliano, Hélène

Date of birth:: July 3rd, 1909 (Paris, France)
Date of death:: August 15th, 1944 (Nice, France )
Nationality:: French

Biography

Born in Paris on July 3, 1909, Hélène Vagliano came from a well-to-do French-Greek family. As early as September 1939, Hélène joined her mother in charitable organizations, and after the French defeat in June 1940, she became a local organizer of the Maison du Prisonnier. In 1943 she was attached to the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'action (BCRA) and, under the pseudonym “veilleuse,” active within the Tartane-Masséna intelligence network. On July 29, 1944, things went wrong. That day, Hélène was arrested in Cannes by the Gestapo and taken to the Nouvelles Prisons in Nice, where she was interrogated and tortured.

Enraged by the Allied landings in southern France, German troops removed Hélène Vagliano and 22 other political prisoners from their cells and brushed them by truck to a wasteland in the Ariane district northeast of Nice, along the Paillon River. There they were shot simultaneously with machine guns.

In Cannes, a street and a school bear her name, which also appears on the city's war memorial. She is buried in the crypt of the Orthodox Church in Cannes. Hélène Vagliano was posthumously named a Knight of the Legion of Honor and awarded the Medal of Resistance and the Croix de Guerre with Palm. She also received the honorary title “Died for France” from the Ministry of Veterans Affairs on May 11, 1965.

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