Victor Gerson

Haim Victor Gerson DSO, LdH (1st of August 1896, Southport, Royaume-Uni - 14 of April 1983, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France), code name Rene, was a Special Operations Executive agent during the Second World War.

[1] He was educated in England, then in Constantinople (Istanbul) and attended Manchester University He joined the British army at the declaration of war and was sent to the Western Front In France and took part in the Battle of the Somme .

[1] in the King's Liverpool regiment, promoted to Corporal, but was recalled to England for eventually joining in the secret services because of his knowledge in languages, however when it was discovered that his father still had Turkish nationality, therefore an enemy alien, he spent the rest of the war in a labour battalion in Northern France and demoted to private.

[6][7] They travelled in HM Submarine P 42 “Unbroken” to Antibes where on the night of 21 April 1942 Churchill took Newman and Zeff and their radios to the shore by canoe, and led them to their contact Dr Élie Lévy.

Gerson gradually built up an escape network to Spain with Lazare Rachline (Lucien Rachet) and Georges Levin, with Thérèse Mitrani in Lyon, René Feraggi in Marseille, and Jacques Mitterrand in Paris.

After the second world war he returned to Paris divorced his second wife, then remarried Yvonne Morin, his son Edward was killed in a motorcycle accident in May 1948 and Victor resumed his activity in fine rugs and carpets.