Clear Lake resident Rita Lietha grew up calling Rolande Amundson “Aunt Gerry.” It wasn’t until she was older that she was told Gerry was her aunt’s code name when she was a member of the French underground resistance during World War II. 

 

A spy in WWII, a survivor of the concentration camps, a nurse, a member of the special forces and a philanthropist, Rolande “Frenchy” Amundson lived a remarkable life of service and sacrifice.

 

Born Rolande Colas de la Nouye, Amundson and her boyfriend were attending medical college in Paris when the Germans shut the school down in 1943. The men were arrested and sent to labor camps.

 

The women were sent home. 

 

Amundson was angry and vowed to help defeat the Germans. Just 20 years old, she joined the French underground resistance, went through six months of Special Operations Executive (SOE) espionage training, and was given the code name “Gerry.”

 

On Sept. 23, 1943, she parachuted into Normandy and made her way to Cherbourg, where she was hired as a cook for German forces, including Commander Erwin Rommel, at the Hotel Atlantique.

 

Because food was sent out from the hotel to troops, Amundson could figure out how many soldiers there were by how many rations were sent, information the Allies needed for their planned D-Day invasion at Normandy. She also kept tabs on changes that were made to a large map on the wall, where little flags pinpointed each German unit needing rations.

 

When Amundson had gathered enough information, she told her supervisors she needed to return to Paris to care for her sick mom. She then visited a drugstore where she told the pharmacist she had intestinal worms, which was his code to contact Allied intelligence agents. He gave her a medicine bottle with coordinates on where she would be picked up.

 

Back in England she shared her information and went through more training. She then parachuted back into Normandy and returned to the hotel. 

 

Three times Amundson made the trip, however on April 27, 1944 she was betrayed and met by French Gendarmes when she parachuted in. The men she was with were killed instantly. She was turned over to the German Gestapo, were she was interrogated for five days. She was beaten, her teeth broken, her jaw broken, and all her fingernails pulled off before they believed she didn’t know anything. 

 

Amundson was put onto a cattle train with hundreds of Jews and sent to Mauthausen Concentration Camp. The trip took 10 days, in which they had no food, no water, and no toilet. At the camp she was stripped, shaved, doused with lice powder and given a striped uniform.

 

Amundson was at the camp for 11 months and 21 days. She and the other women would split and move rocks in the quarry. After the bodies of people killed in the gas chambers were thrown into trenches they had to pour quicklime over the bodies to speed composition.

 

They ate boiled potato peelings and cabbage stems in water. When there was no water they drank their urine and rubbed it onto their skin for hydration. 

 

She was experimented on and her legs were covered in scars from the bites of German Shepherds. On Christmas Eve 18 guards raped her and some of the other women.

 

On May 5, 1945 the U.S. 11th Armored Division of the 3rd U.S. Army liberated the camp. Amundson and the others drug themselves to a field across the road and ate the grass on their hands and knees.

 

She weighed 89 pounds.