JANINE DE GREEF, aged 95
Along with all of her family she was a key member of the Comet Line, getting Allied airmen out of Belgium at great risk to herself.
DAVID DUSHMAN, aged 98
Fencing played a big part in his life. He was the man who liberated Auschwitz – and went on to coach the USSR fencing team in the Olympics.
BEPPE PIRODDI, aged 82
An Italian playboy in the 1960s he was part of a group known as The Four Musketeers. He had affairs with rich women and had celebrity friends, as long as connections with royals and the Mafia.
MONIQUE HANOTTE, aged 101
A Belgian schoolgirl who joined the Comet Line, rescuing Allied airmen from the Nazis, she was forced into a daring escape herself.
MEHRAN KARIMI NASSERI, aged 77
Thrown out of Iran, he lost his papers and was a refugee trapped in Charles de Gaulle airport where he lived for 18 years – and inspired a film.
JUSTUS ROSENBERG, aged 100
A refugee from Poland he became an active member of the French Resistance with a dramatic escape from the Nazis. In later life a professor in universities.
ASSUNTA ‘PUPETTA’ MARESCA, aged 86
Brought up in a Mafia family, her husband was murdered by a gang rival. She took bloody revenge, and after serving time in prison became a Mafia gang leader in her own right.
JOZEF WALASZCZYK, aged 103
A young factory owner in Poland during the war, he saved many workers from the Nazis at great risk to himself. He also saved his girlfriend and her friends. After the war he was restricted by the Communist regime.
VALERI POLYAKOV, aged 80
A qualified doctor he became a cosmonaut and completed two separate journeys into space, where he did medical experiments. He holds the world record for the longest continuous spell in space.
TEKLA JUNIEWICZ, aged 116
Born in 1906 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she lived through two world wars and lived in Poland. She became the oldest person ever in Poland and the second oldest in the world.
ANDREE GEULEN-HERSCOVICI, aged 100
A teacher in Belgium when the Nazis invaded in 1940, she joined the CDJ, an organisation dedicated to saving Jewish people. Despite extreme danger to herself she saved the life of many children.
ROSMARIE TRAPP, aged 93
The last surviving daughter of the Von Trapp family, made famous in the 1965 film ‘The Sound of Music’. All is not what it seems.
DAGNY CARLSSON, aged 109
After working all her life in Sweden’s textile industry she started a blog aged 100 and became a social media celebrity – the world’s oldest blogger.
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