10. A Courageous Fireman
Georges Charles Louis Blind (1904 – 1944) was a French fireman, ambulance driver, and French Resistance member from Belfort. He became famous in 1984 when a photograph was published to try and identify an anonymous man’s display of extraordinary courage in the face of death. It depicted a man with his back to a wall, identified as near a moat in the Belfort Citadel, and a wide smile across his face as he faced a German firing squad with its raised rifles aimed at him.
A man from Belfort stepped forward and identified the man in the picture as Georges Blind, his father, who had died in Nazi custody. A blacksmith, Blind became a fireman in 1929. A few months into the Nazi occupation of France, he and others sheltered a statue of Edith Cavell, a World War I heroine who had been executed by the Germans.
