Georges Loinger

French-Jewish resistance fighter during World War II and notable centenarian, he died in Paris on 28 December 2018 at the age of 108.

He was born in Strasbourg, then part of Imperial Germany, to Solomon Loinger (1883-1941) and Mina Werzberg (1886-1981). His cousin is Marcel Marceau and his niece is Israeli singer Yardena Arazi. In 1925 he entered the Hatikvah Zionist youth movement.

In 1935 he was a physical education teacher. As National Monitor of the Israelite Scouts of France, he created a sports club in Belleville for Jewish children. In the years before the Second World War, he took care of young Jewish refugees from Germany at château de la Guette, a property owned by Baroness Germaine de Rothschild.

He began fighting against Nazi Germany in the beginning of World War II, but he was captured in 1940. However, Loinger escaped from his camp of imprisonment later that year, with his cousin Simon Mangel, the brother of Marcel Marceau. With the support of Dr. Joseph Weill, whom he had met in 1930, one of his friends in Strasbourg and leader of the Children's Relief Work, he went on to rescue hundreds of Jewish children over the next few years before Liberation.

He was part of the Réseau Garel (Garel Network) in Lyon (1942-1944), along with his sister Fanny Loinger (1915-1992), a nurse. But it was only after the war that brother and sister discovered that they were both part of the Resistance as part of Réseau Garel.

After the war, he worked to facilitate the passage of survivors of Nazism to Mandatory Palestine and played a big role in the Exodus. He was then working as director of the French subsidiary of the Israeli shipping company Zim Integrated Shipping Services.

He turned 100 in August 2010. In March 2013, during a trip to Israel at the age of 102, he was received by Shimon Peres, the former president of Israel. He was awarded the medal of honorary citizen of the city of Strasbourg in 2014.