Countess Andrée Eugénie Adrienne de Jongh (30 November 1916 – 13 October 2007), called Dédée and Postman, was a member of the Belgian Resistance during the Second World War.

She organised and led the Comet Line (Le Réseau Comète) to assist Allied soldiers and airmen to escape from Nazi-occupied Belgium.

Edith Cavell, a British nurse shot in the Tir national in Schaerbeek in 1915 for assisting troops to escape from occupied Belgium to the neutral Netherlands, was her heroine.

De Jongh was described by a British airman she helped as a "frail young girl who appears twenty years [old], very pretty, pleasant, kind, cheerful, and simple.

De Jongh organised a series of safe houses for these soldiers, while also procuring civilian clothes for them as well as false ID papers.

After they successfully crossed the Pyrenees mountains on the Franco-Spanish border, de Jongh and Deppé left their charges to fend for themselves and returned to Belgium.

From this experience, de Jongh realised that in future exfiltrations they must establish a relationship with the British Consulate in Bilbao to ensure the safety in Spain of the people they escorted out of occupied Belgian and France.

It seemed unlikely to them that this young woman with three soldiers in tow had travelled from German-occupied Belgium, through occupied France, and over the Pyrenees to Spain, a straight-line distance of some 800 kilometres (500 miles) (and much further by the roundabout route they had taken).

In France, de Jongh received airmen from Brussels, cared for them in safe houses, escorted them by railroad to Bayonne or nearby cities near the Spanish border, and trekked with them across the Pyrenees to Spain.

[17] Once she had successfully crossed the border, de Jongh turned her charges over to the British who would drive them to Gibraltar where they would be flown back to Great Britain.

While the airmen proceeded onward, de Jongh met in San Sebastián with British diplomat Michael Creswell, ("Monday"), who gave her money for the Comet Line's expenses plus messages to take back to France.

[18][19] Estimates of the number of times that de Jongh successfully escorted downed airmen across the border into Spain in 1941 and 1942 vary from 16 to 24 round trips.

During the war hundreds of workers for the Comet Line were arrested by the Geheime Feldpolizei of the Abwehr and many were executed or deported to German prisons and concentration camps.

They arrived at the safe house belonging to Frantxia Usandizanga, a Basque woman, intending to continue to the border, 7 kilometres (4.3 miles) distant.

[28] In de Jongh's absence and under the leadership of Jean Greindl and Antoine d'Ursel, the Comet Line continued to function and helped more than 700 Allied soldiers reach safety during the war.

Although de Jongh survived in the concentration camps, she became gravely ill and undernourished by the time she was released by the advancing Allies in April 1945.

[31] Goikoetxea continued to be the preferred Comet Line guide until wounded and captured by the Germans (but rescued by the de Greef family) shortly before France was liberated by the Allies in 1944.

[32] After her concentration camp experiences, de Jongh resurfaced in summer 1945 in the middle of the night at Donald Darling's Paris Awards Office.

[33] Post-war, de Jongh finished her nursing studies and worked in leprosariums, first in the Belgian Congo, then in Cameroon, next in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

In In Search of a Character: Two African Journals, Greene wrote that he asked her why she had come to the Congo; she replied, "Because from the age of fifteen I wanted to cure lepers.