Magda Elisa Larissa Grilli di Cortona was born on November 2, 1901, in Florence, Italy and died October 10, 1996 at age 94 in a hospital in Paris where she lived. Her ashes were interred beside her husband in 1997 in the Protestant Cemetery, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Auvergne Region, France. Her husband, Andre Trocme, a French protestant pastor, died in 1971 at age 70. In 1972, Israel posthumously awarded him the Medal of Righteousness. Magda, her husband, and thousands of other residents of the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the plateau region of southern France had risked their lives during WW2 to feed, clothe, hide and protect at least 2,500 who would have died without their help. Her Russian mother, Nelly, died soon after Magda's birth. Magda's Italian father, Oscar, born of Florentine nobility, was an engineer and a colonel in the Italian (Cavalry) army corps of engineers. Several years after Nelly's death, Oscar married an Italian catholic woman and they had three children. Magda's role model, however, was her maternal grandmother, Varia Poggio Wissotzky, a strong, independent woman born in Siberi where her father had been exiled by the Czar. Varia, a Russian Orthodox Christian, had left her husband in Russia, moved to Florence, Italy; converted converted to Protestantism and volunteered with the Salvation Army. Magda' step-mother sent her to a Catholic convent school where she was raised there from the age of 10 to 18. Later she studied Italina at the Magistero, an elite institute in Florence, Italy. In 1925, she attended the old School of Social Work at Columbia University in New York under a scholarship. While in New York, she met André Trocmé, a "pacifist" student at the Union Theological Seminary, they were married in 1926 and had four children. In 1934 they moved to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, a remote Protestant village where he was sent as a pastor and where they lived until after WW2. Magda was a highly organized, tireless and practical woman, never deeply religious but 100% humanist. The need for funds meant that there were always boarders, usually about four French students, making the number of children in the house eight.