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Marthe Cohn’s perilous account of sneaking behind enemy lines in World War II while concealing her identity as an Orthodox Jew seems ripped from the pages of a spy novel. Now 98, Cohn had the chutzpah to mingle with German troops to gather the intelligence the Allies needed to stage bombing runs and change the course of the war. “When your life is at stake, you do everything you need to do to survive,” said Cohn, who lives in Palos Verde, California, and wrote about her experiences in “Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany.” Cohn, who at age 80 received France’s highest military honor, the Medaille Militaire, for her intelligence work, will appear at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Southern Oregon Music Recital Hall, 450 S. Mountain Ave., Ashland, at the invitation of Chabad of Southern Oregon. Rabbi Avi Zwiebel said tickets are still available for the event, running $15 in advance or up to $100 if you want to sit up front.. Tickets at the door are $20. Zwiebel said he’s admired Cohn for years, noting that she is one of the few remaining survivors from the time of the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of more than 6 million Jews in Europe. Zwiebel said he has many family members who died during the Holocaust, so Cohn’s detailed account of working for French intelligence resonates with him. With anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe and America, Zweibel said he thought it was time to reach out to Cohn to see whether she would make an appearance locally. “After the Pittsburgh shooting last year, Marthe’s story seemed even more important,” Zweibel said. The shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue left 11 dead and six injured. Cohn, reached by phone at her home, said she is alarmed at what’s happening in the U.S. and Europe, a situation all too reminiscent of growing up during the rise of Hitler. “It’s exactly what happened during the early ’30s in Germany,” she said. Cohn said the thing that appealed to Germans more than Hitler himself was the propaganda being spewed by Joseph Goebbels, who was minister of propaganda. “Right now, the fake news we see feels like it comes from Goebbels,” Cohn said. “Lies, if you repeat the lies often enough, people will believe them.” She lived in the French border city of Metz, where lots of Germans lived at the time and where she had early memories of anti-Semitism. Cohn learned both French and German. When she was young, after returning home from a visit to the grocery store, a neighbor girl told her, “You’re a dirty Jew,” according to an account from Cohn’s book. When the girl continued taunting her, Cohn lifted a bag of eggs and smashed them on the girl’s head. She ran home empty-handed and told her mother what happened. “You were absolutely right, Marthe,” her mother said. “You must never, ever let anyone get away with calling you such terrible names.” Later when Jews were being rounded up throughout Europe, Cohn remembers many French people who risked their lives by helping her family and others when they moved to Poitiers, France. As a result of the help from French people, 75 percent of the Jews living in France at the time survived, Cohn said. “We feel like we were protected by our citizens,” she said. “Many told us that they don’t like Jews, but they don’t like the way we were treated.” She remembers later during the war in Germany going to the cinema, pretending she was German herself and taking some satisfaction knowing she was fooling them. “I looked around and said to myself, ‘If they knew who I am,’” Cohn said. In her book, Cohn describes the difficulties she had as a spy who adopted the nom de guerre “Martha Ulrich” and pretended she was a young nurse fleeing the Allies. But Cohn, who had blond hair and blue eyes, had remarkable survival skills and was quick on her feet. She said she was often terrified but could quickly master her nerves. One time, she was hitchhiking with other Germans and got picked up by a military truck. Everyone climbed into the bed, huddled together and shivered through the night. In the morning, the driver unexpectedly let everyone out in the middle of the countryside, and an exhausted Cohn fell asleep on the grass in the bright sunlight. When Allied planes flew overhead, one of the Germans tried to rouse her, and she sleepily cried out, “What’s happening” in French. Realizing her mistake, she said something in German and ran up a hill, hiding quickly in the tall grass. Cohn said she always scouted out an escape route when she was behind enemy lines. Before anyone followed her, Cohn made her way to another road where she flagged down a milk truck. She eventually made it to a town, where she was able to secretly pass off intelligence she had gleaned from the Germans. Although she is often described as a holocaust survivor, Cohn quickly points out that she was never a prisoner and didn’t know a lot about concentration camps until she saw the emaciated victims at the end of the war. “I thought they’d escaped from a psychiatric hospital,” she recalled. During the war, Cohn had held out hope that her sister, Stephanie, was still alive, but when she found out about the death camps, her hopes were dashed. She said the trauma that she endured as a Jew in France under the Nazis’ occupation is difficult to explain. Her rights were stripped away, and Jews couldn’t go to public places, including parks, train stations or even take a swim in the river. The penalty for disobeying was deportation or death, she said. Even though she has led a tumultuous life, Cohn said she’s somewhat surprised that she’s lived so long. “Since I was a very young child, I always said I would die young,” she said. “I guess this is my punishment for saying I was going to die young.” That long life has allowed Cohn to share her memories to others in the U.S. and around the world. “War taught us many things, among them that, like anyone, I could be a coward one minute and brave the next, depending entirely on circumstance,” she wrote in her book. “They say that war brings out the best and the worst in people, and I certainly saw both sides.” Reach reporter Damian Mann at 541-776-4476 or [email protected] Follow him on www.twitter.com.reporterdm.