Brigitte Friang

Template:Short description Template:Template other Brigitte Friang (23 January 1924 – 6 March 2011) was a French journalist, writer and French Resistance member.

Biography

Friang was born in Paris in 1924 and immediately after leaving school in Paris in 1943 joined the French Resistance. Working in the same group as Colonel F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, she was captured by the Gestapo, shot while trying to escape, then taken to Fresnes Prison and tortured, before being deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

After the war, Friang was liberated and returned to Paris where she worked for four years as a press aide to André Malraux, before becoming a journalist. In 1953, she was sent to French Indochina as a war correspondent. There she undertook parachute training and was dropped, in the opening hours of Operation Castor, into Điện Biên Province, in the north-west corner of Vietnam. She made several combat jumps including one with Lt Col Bigeard's 6th Colonial Paratroop Battalion at Tu-Le after which she accompanied the 6th on their retreat to French lines. She survived the war and returned to Paris where she worked as a writer and journalist until her retirement.

On 6 June 1954, she appeared as a challenger on the TV panel show What's My Line? (the mystery guests for that episode were George Burns and Gracie Allen).

Friang died 6 March 2011 at the age of 87.