On September 7, 1944, Lucie Aubrac arrived in London after a series of escapes, rescues, and crossings that had consumed three years of her life. She was thirty years old. She had just organized the armed rescue of her husband Raymond from Gestapo headquarters in Lyon — an operation involving a twelve-person team, forged German military documents, a machine gun, and a truck.

Aubrac was born in 1912 in Mâcon to a working-class family, trained as a history teacher, and was living in Lyon with her husband when France fell in 1940. They joined the Libération-Sud resistance network immediately. She recruited for the network, distributed clandestine newspapers, forged identity documents, and moved Jews and resisters across the demarcation line into unoccupied territory. She was arrested twice by the Vichy police and released both times, once by forging documentation that claimed she was the mistress of a German officer and pregnant with his child.

Raymond was arrested by Klaus Barbie's Gestapo in June 1943. Aubrac spent months engineering his rescue — first attempting legal approaches, then organizing the armed operation that extracted him from a prison transport on October 21, 1943. She was, by that point, seven months pregnant. They escaped through Spain to London.

She lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia after the war. She wrote a memoir, testified at Barbie's war crimes trial in 1987, and remained publicly active until her death in 2007 at ninety-four.

The official photographs of the Libération-Sud command show the men.