Georges Loinger died recently and his passing caused quite a stir among the global media. This was because Loinger is another of the so-called ‘Other Schindlers’ that I have previously covered. His story is simple enough:
‘The French Resistance hero, who has died at the age of 108, would set up ball games for children along the Swiss border in France. Having trained the children to run like the wind, he would throw the ball over the border and tell them to chase after it and then keep running.
In an interview published this year, Loinger said he had used the lightly guarded border as a life-saving escape route during the earlier part of the war.
“I threw the ball 100 metres towards the Swiss border and told the children to run and get the ball. They ran after the ball and this is how they crossed,” he told Tablet magazine. “After that, the Italians left France and the German came in. It became too dangerous to play ball with the children like this. With the Germans we didn’t play these games.”
Using this method, and a variety of other ruses, Loinger personally saved at least 350 children, for which he was awarded the Resistance Medal, the Military Cross and the Legion of Honour.
[…]
Born in Strasbourg to a Jewish family in 1910, Loingner was a talented athlete and a cousin of the famous mime artist and fellow Resistance member Marcel Marceau. While serving with the French army, he was taken prisoner by German forces in 1940 and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. But as a result of his blond hair and blue eyes, his captors did not realise he was Jewish.’ (1)
Now think about this with a critical eye for a minute; Loinger’s story amounts of the fact that that he was an athletic jew who escaped/was released from German custody because they thought he was French not jewish because of his athleticism, blonde hair and blue eyes. This is in of itself plausible assuming that the Germans didn’t cross check Loinger’s name against French records – which is entirely possible – but the idea that he set up a ‘life-saving escape route’ on the Franco-Swiss border by taking jewish children to the mountains and kicking a ball over the border for them to chase and thus ‘get into Swiss territory’ is a bit ludicrous.
I mean the first one or two times then I’d understand, but beyond that even the Italian border guards would get a little suspicious of the same man repeatedly going up to the Franco-Swiss border with a different children, kicking the ball over while having the child chase it for the child to then disappear into Switzerland. Sounds a bit ludicrous when he claims to have done this at least 350 times doesn’t it?
I smell a hoax: don’t you?
References
(1) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/30/french-resistance-hero-saved-jewish-children-dies-georges-loinger; also see http://www.newser.com/story/269245/he-saved-hundreds-of-jews-some-by-throwing-them-a-ball.html