French Resistance hero Georges Loinger, who used his ingenuity and athletic prowess to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish children during World War II, died on Friday at the age of 108, Agence France-Presse reported.
A talented athlete and cousin of the famous mime artist and fellow Resistance member Marcel Marceau, Loinger would smuggle the children in small groups across the French-Swiss border by throwing a ball and telling them to run after it.
Another ruse involved dressing children up as mourners and taking them to a cemetery whose wall abutted the French side of the border, AFP reported.
With the help of a gravedigger's ladder, the "mourners" would clamber over the wall and head for the border just feet away.
France's Holocaust Memorial Foundation described Loinger on its website as an "exceptional man."
The children he saved, whose parents had been killed or sent to Nazi concentration camps, were under the responsibility of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, a Jewish children's aid society founded in St. Petersburg in 1912.
Loinger, an uncle of famed Israeli singer Yardena Arazi, was awarded the Resistance Medal, the Military Cross and the Legion of Honor.
Born in Strasbourg in 1910, he was serving with the French army in 1940 when he was taken prisoner by the Germans and was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany.
Due to his blond hair and blue eyes, his captors did not suspect that he was Jewish, and he managed to escape and return to France and join the OSE.
Between April 1943 and June 1944, OSE workers and other rescuers helped hundreds of children escape to Switzerland across the lightly guarded border.
Loinger alone is credited with saving at least 350 children.
