Chilean activist who was honoured in November 2005 at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial (the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority) as one of the “Righteous Among The Nations,” for her participation during the Holocaust in helping to save Jewish children in France. Her actions were not limited to saving Jews but she also actively helped the French resistance.
While still quite young, she married Guillermo Errázuriz Vergara, and they moved to Paris, where he was to take up his diplomatic post. Errázuriz killed himself in 1922, leaving her a widow. After his death, she decided to remain in France. In 1926, she married her second husband, the French writer Jacques Feydeau, but the marriage soon ended.
During the German occupation of Paris, she worked as a volunteer nurse at the Hôpital Rothschild. While working there, she joined the French Resistance, and helped, many times by risking her own life, to rescue Jewish children who had been separated from their parents and were sentenced to be sent to the concentration camps to be eliminated. She was arrested, interrogated and tortured several times by the Gestapo, but was able to escape death thanks to her background and diplomatic relations.
On 2 September 1953, María Edwards was awarded the Legion d’Honneur for bravery in France. She returned to Chile with René Núñez Schwartz, a Spanish Jew with whom she lived until she died on 8 June 1972 in Santiago, aged 78.
She was also known as María Edwards de Errázuriz or María Errázuriz – her original married names.
Link to Wikipedia biography