In love with the Resistance: My mother-in-law's war

Later this month the wartime police chief of a small town in southern France will be declared "righteous" by the Holocaust memorial centre, Yad Vashem. Behind the move lies a story of shared resistance to Nazism by local Protestants and a Jewish militia, which Rosie Whitehouse came across while researching her family history.

On a moonlit night in March 1944, two agents floated down on parachutes into the Languedoc highlands east of Castres, in southern France.

One was Pierre Haymann, a Parisian Jew who had been trained in sabotage and partisan warfare in the UK. The other was Bernard Schlumberger, a Protestant from Alsace, who was to be the Free French army's envoy in the Toulouse region of south-west France.

Their brief was to unite the scattered local Resistance militias behind Free French leader Gen Charles de Gaulle, from a base in the tiny town of Vabre where they had been guaranteed protection by local partisans.

But before starting work, Pierre travelled 400km to the city of Lyon to find his girlfriend, Marion Müller, from whom he had been parted 15 months earlier.