

She sat on a downed English airplane wing with its lucky pilot before Nazi troops arrived. She watched friends get loaded into trucksįor transportation to labor camps. Her transition to life in Noank is detailed in "The White Pocketbook." Mom knew Hitler’s favorite general.

Out the German soldiers who were preparing to burn the entire village to the ground. Mom survived by only hours when American troops chased Anne Frank died only a week before freedom arrived at the camp. Unfortunately, she wasįound and taken to a labor camp. The story rivals that of another famous young girl who was hiding from the Nazis while writing a diary during the occupation of Holland. After the wedding, she fell and broke her hip requiring a long recovery during which she stayed in our home.ĭetails emerged through heartbreaking conversations and after pouring through thousands of letters and pictures in her collections. Was revealed when Mom visited our home in Maine for my sons’ wedding.

Her transformation to American life and her courageous struggle to raise six children in Noank, mostly by herself, "The White Pocketbook" is the amazing story of how Andree Florin Bannon, survived WWII while a young girl living for four years in her basement underīelgian occupation by Nazi soldiers. The White Pocketbook is a late but necessary voice "coming out of the shadows." The dramatic experiences of her youth shape her every move even after seventy years of silence.

She lived World War II in her basement for four years. Andree, only fourteen when the invasions began lived the horrors but didn't reveal her life until she was eighty four years old and lying in a hospital bed. Hitler's nightmare, The Walloon Belgian resistance kept Nazi troops wondering how to force the residents of Bouillon to submit to the new order. The White Pocketbook: Andree's World War Two Resistance in Belgium
