Born in 1909, Pierrette-Marcelle Poirier-Prous, known as Cathie, rescued 236 Jewish children and numerous Eastern European Jewish adults between July 1941 and June1944.

When the recently widowed Cathie Poirier-Prous moved to Poitiers in 1941 looking for work, she was deeply alarmed by the sight of Jewish children marked with the yellow star. Authorities at the nearby concentration camp, Route de Limoges, allowed the children out each day, to be fed by local Jewish families, then locked them up at nightfall. In groups of ten, Cathie brought dozens of these foreign children into her home for French language lessons, thereby improving their chances of escaping deportation to death camps.

Soon Poirier-Prous was deeply involved in every aspect of rescue to save these children. Working with several social service organizations, the French Resistance, and with the support of the Archbishop of Bourges, for three years she dedicated herself to finding families, convents, and schools that would take in the threatened children. She became part of a network distributing smuggled funds to help feed and sustain them. Her rescue efforts eventually extended to numerous Jewish adults, primarily from Poland and Czechoslovakia. Suspected by the authorities, she was frequently detained and sometimes arrested, but managed each time to save herself from punishment. By the end, she was suffering malnutrition and mental collapse, from which she felt she never fully recovered.

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