Fernande Keufgens Davis was 16 years old, one of eight children in a close-knit Belgian family living in the small town of Montzen, when the Germans invaded Belgium in May 1940. Her father remembered the horrors of World War I and, hoping to protect Fernande from deportation, sent her to Andenne to work in the household of a friend. But war exploded nevertheless on their doorstep. “I had all kinds of courage and guts; I don’t know where that came from,” says Fernande Keufgens Davis (“Freddie”) of the risks that she took as a teenager in the Belgian Resistance. After the shock of finding that her formerly occupied village had been annexed as part of Germany, Davis was drafted to work in a German munitions factory. Determined not to aid the enemy, she jumped from the train and went underground, to join the Maquis.
Download Fernande’s biography (pdf). Download Timestamp Document (pdf).
