Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore

Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe spent most of their lives together, and WW2 would not change that. Pre war they mingled with (and indeed were) some of the most famous movers and shakers of artsy surreal 1930's France. They chose the names Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore while themselves and their work were experimenting with gender. During the war they went by their birth names to avoid any extra suspicion from the occupiers, but I believe that they would have stayed with their chosen names has those events not occured. So I'm mostly referring to them as those names. They were probably non-binary before there were the words or acceptance for it, so they did identify as she/her and lesbians but if placed into today's times, may well have used different.

Gender play and surreal art went down great in the big cities, but on the more conservative island of Jersey, they were more guarded and outcast. They used this feeling of being outcast to connect with the stationed German soldiers,of whom many must have been missing their homes or having doubts. With their artistic skills, they worked together on all sorts of pamphlets of information, poetry and drawings and even installations to harness and grow these doubts in the soldiers.The work became signed under the name of "The Unknown Soldier" leading to unrest among the occupying German troops,with those in command getting more and more paranoid.

They were caught, arrested and sentenced to death, but what saved them, like many in these resistance tales, is the strange power of being underestimated. They were held for much longer while the officers waited for them to confess who the man in charge was. Of course there was no such man. The war ended before their sentence could be carried out, and Claude was photographed holding what she called the 'dirty eagle" in her teeth.