Former French Jewish spy Marthe Cohn was white hatted in Calgary on Sunday.
The 98-year-old Holocaust survivor was welcomed into the elite group by Mayor Naheed Nenshi at the Calgary International Airport.
Instead of receiving a key to the city, visiting dignitaries are presented with the iconic white Smithbilt cowboy hat. The tradition started in the 1950s and continues today, with Calgary mayors bestowing the symbol of western hospitality on guests ever since.
Cohn is in Calgary to share her harrowing and heroic story on March 26 at the Jack Singer Concert Hall.
Before presenting Cohn and her husband Major L. Cohn with hats, Nenshi talked to her about what he called today’s dark times.
“We’re living in times where anger and division and anti-Semitism seem to be growing louder and louder and louder,” he said.
“It’s as bad as in the early ’30s,” Cohn chimed in.
Nenshi offered his appreciation to Cohn.
“We can’t let the small things go by because those small things invariably lead a direct line to the kind of violent and terrorizing acts that we’re seeing, so keep up the faith,” he said. “Thank you for doing this for so very long.”
“I am a very small compartment,” the under-five-foot woman said with a laugh.
Cohn was born in Metz, France in 1920.
As Hitler gained prominence, Cohn’s sister was sent to Auschwitz while her family fled to the south of France.
After the Liberation of Paris in 1944, Cohn joined the intelligence service of the First French Army. She used her “German accent and Aryan appearance” to pose as a German nurse trying to find out a fake fiancé’s status, according to the Arts Commons.
Cohn received the Croix de Guerre, Médaille Militaire and France’s highest military honour, la Légion d’Honneur, for her bravery.
In 2002, Cohn wrote Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany.
WATCH (May 17, 2016): Holocaust survivor and former Jewish spy Marthe Cohn talks to Global News’ Camille Ross about her amazing exploits as a spy in Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
In a 2016 Global News interview, Cohn said she interrogated prisoners of war, colonels and generals, and then relayed that critical information to the Allied commanders.
She is concerned with how history seems to be repeating itself decades after the Second World War.
“We have to fight it,” Cohn said. “That’s all I know.”
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