Born and raised in a farming family in the south of France, Anne Marie Guillot was thirty-four years old and married, but childless, at the outbreak of war in 1939. After France fell to the German invaders, her husband, who at the start of the war had been mobilized in the French army, joined the Resistance.
Anne Marie spent the war years living in Sainte Bazeille, where she and her husband ran a general store selling groceries, and sundry household staples to the neighborhood families. Their location was in the unoccupied Free Zone, but very close to the Demarcation Line of the German Occupied Zone. Like her husband, Anne Marie also volunteered to work for the French Resistance. The special mission of her group was the rescue of people, Jews and others, fleeing Nazi persecution.
Beginning in 1942, until the liberation of France in 1945, Anne Marie's efforts saved the lives of nine Jewish people: the Chief Rabbi of Bordeaux, his wife and three children, and four other children that the Rabbi had been protecting after their families were deported.
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