Lois Gunden began her short memoir, published in 1945, by quoting the Bible. “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

Her rescue work in France, she wrote, required a lot of running, and she could not afford to become weary.

At the age of twenty-six, Gunden, a Mennonite and French teacher from Goshen, Indiana, sailed to Europe to head the Villa St. Christophe refugee children’s home in Canet-Plage, France. She had not been involved with overseas relief work before, and had never been to Europe. But she spoke French, and the Mennonite Central Committee needed someone willing to place herself in danger to help others. Gunden was willing.

Gunden arrived at Villa St. Christophe, a large summer home near the Mediterranean, in October 1941. She began to care for sixty children, ranging from toddlers to teenagers. At that time, Villa St. Christophe housed Spanish children whose parents had fought on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War and were imprisoned in French internment camps. Many of the children had been imprisoned in the nearby Rivesaltes internment camp and were severely malnourished. Gunden and the other workers at the home, many of whom were refugees themselves, patiently nursed the children back to health.

In 1942, Gunden also began to care for Jewish children who were released or smuggled out of French internment camps with the help of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker aid organization, and the Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), a French children’s aid organization. On at least one occasion, Gunden refused to allow French police to search Villa St. Christophe for Jewish children, thereby saving the children’s lives.

In November 1942, Nazi Germany occupied southern France. Gunden, who was away from Villa St. Christophe at the time, arranged for her colleagues to continue to care for the children and move them to safety. Two months later, the police arrested Gunden; because she was an American, Germany imprisoned her as the citizen of an enemy nation. She and the other Americans captured in southern France—mainly US diplomats, journalists, and aid workers—were taken to Nazi Germany, where they were held in a resort hotel complex for more than a year until being released as part of a prisoner exchange.

After returning to the United States in March 1944, Lois Gunden went home to Goshen, Indiana, and resumed her work teaching French. She remained active in the Mennonite Church until her 2005 death and rarely spoke about her wartime experiences.

In 2013, Lois Gunden was posthumously designated as “Righteous Among the Nations,” a title granted by Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust, to honor non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.