The Resistance spies whose daughter grew up without knowing who they were

In 1966, a student writing her name in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris drew the attention of an elderly man. The encounter exposed a family history she had never been told. Aude Yung-de Prévaux’s parents were Jacques and Lotka de Prévaux, Resistance agents executed during the final summer of the German occupation.

She had been an infant when they died and had grown up with a paternal uncle and aunt. Their identities had been kept from her, according to Publishers Weekly’s account of the biography she later wrote. The work became a reconstruction of two lives whose clandestine service had left their daughter dependent on other people’s memories, documents and letters.

Jacques’s professional life had been in the navy, including command of the cruiser Duguay-Trouin. Lotka, a Jewish woman with Polish roots, had entered the fashion world in Paris. Kirkus’s review describes the family rupture surrounding their relationship: he divorced his first wife to marry her, and relatives withdrew. The couple then entered a war in which their different skills became part of the same intelligence effort.

Their organisation was F2, a network with a substantial Polish presence. Jacques made contact in 1941 and became a naval informant under the name Vox. After arrests disrupted the network, he helped its reorganisation and in May 1943 took charge of the Anne subnetwork, covering Toulon, Nice and Marseille.

He combined clandestine travel with running a food-products business. The official Order of Liberation biography credits his network with information on German transport to Africa, naval movements, airfields and fortifications. Lotka worked as a courier, according to the published account of their daughter’s research. Their contribution depended on moving information between people as well as recognising what to report.

They were arrested together on March 29, 1944. The Order’s biography records Jacques’s imprisonment and torture at Montluc in Lyon, where he took responsibility for the network without exposing his comrades. Both were shot at Bron on August 19. Postwar honours recorded his service, including admission to the Order of Liberation in January 1946.

Their daughter’s discovery came long after those public acts of remembrance. Her biography, published in English as Love in the Tempest of History, recovered a story in which a naval officer and a courier had become intelligence partners. The secrecy that surrounded their work was followed by a separate silence inside the family that survived them.