On Feb. 19, 2021, Henriette “Monique” Hanotte passed away in the Belgian city of Nivelles. She was 101. While her name is not one spoken as loudly or as often as folks like Roosevelt, Truman, or Churchill, she was a true hero of World War II. As a teenager in Belgium, Hanotte became a part of the Comet Line, a resistance network that risked their lives to save “Allied airmen from capture, torture and likely execution by the Nazis.” It is as a resistance fighter that she was given the codename “Monique,” the name she would go by for the rest of her long life.
Hanotte began her service in the late spring of 1940 when two British Army officers showed up at her father’s small hotel in her hometown of Rumes, Belgium. Along with her brother, Henriette fed and clothed the officers, removed identifiers that they were British, and the family was able to successfully get the two men back across the border into the arms of the French resistance. MI9 officers knew of the Hanotte family’s sympathy to the Allied cause and asked whether or not Henriette would want to be a part of the Comet Line.
That is when Henriette became Monique.
The Washington Post reports that Hanotte used her intimate knowledge of the Belgian-French border, where she played as a child, to shepherd over 135 airmen to safety. Her career ended when she was injured during training to become an intelligence officer who would parachute behind enemy lines. She has received honors from the British and from America for her wartime work. She has even had a statue commemorating her courage erected in her home town.
In 1945, she married Jules Thomé, a Belgian police patrolman, and they had two children, Bernadette and Bernard. Her husband predeceased her, and she is survived by her children, six grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.
A few years ago, Sue Roark shared the story of her 20-year-old brother H.C. Johnson’s journey as a “flight engineer and top turret gunner of a B-17 F Model Flying Fortress,” shot down by Nazis over Gelsenkirchen, Germany, parachuting to safety in a sugar and beet field just outside of Belgium. It was here that Monique and other Comet Line fighters were able to eventually reunite him with other airmen, and got him clear of immediate danger.
Sue’s daughter Anita said it well: “The thing we sometimes forget when we think about this story is that the Comet Line included a series of places, but the Comet Line itself was made up of people. These were people whose country had been invaded and who wanted freedom and were so grateful to the Allied troops they tried to help. The people of the Comet Line — like ‘Monique’ — were just as heroic as the troops they saved.”
RIP, Monique.