Veteran lauded for helping preserve history and legacy as well as vital role played during second world war

The Bletchley Park code breaker Charlotte “Betty” Webb has died at the age of 101, the Women’s Royal Army Corps Association (WRACA) has confirmed.

Arriving at Bletchley from the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) aged just 18, Webb spent four years during the second world war at the code-breaking centre working in various roles.

Michel Hazanavicius’s sentimental tale about a baby found in the woods features sweet little cartoon birds and rabbits as well as the real horror of Nazi death camps

Directed by Michel Hazanavicius, this postmodern Holocaust fairytale premiered at Cannes last year, and turns out to be a dreamy animated curiosity which is certainly different to the icy realist rigour of other films which have appeared there on the same theme, such as Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest or László Nemes’s Son of Saul. It is adapted from a novella by author and screenwriter Jean-Claude Grumberg (who collaborated with Truffaut on The Last Metro), whose own father was murdered in the Nazi death camps.

The late Jean-Louis Trintignant has his final credit as the narrator, introducing us to scenes that could, at first glance, be from the Brothers Grimm. We see a dense central European forest … through which a second world war Nazi train is seen speeding through, carrying terrified Jews to Auschwitz. One man, with a wife, young child and a baby makes a desperate decision to throw his baby out on to the snowy hillside in the hope that someone finds it – and someone does.

You can forget the advice on disguises, secret codes and spreading propaganda by dropping leaflets in train carriages. But there is something for us all here about the need for action

The SOE Syllabus was a series of lectures given to prospective secret agents in Britain during the second world war. These “lessons in ungentlemanly warfare” were released from the top secret bit of the Public Record Office (now known as the National Archive) and published as a historical curio in 2001, when my esteemed colleague John Crace picked out the sillier bits in one of his Digested Read reviews. There was a whole lecture about how to craft a disguise, in which people with sticky-out ears were advised to use glue to pin them back.

But now, 24 years later, I have picked up the book with a graver purpose – just on the off-chance that if we end up having to resist a fascist state, the past might have something to offer. They won’t know everything, these ungentlemanly gentlemen, being as they didn’t have the internet. But they can’t have known nothing.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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The Oscar‑winning director of The Artist spent five years creating The Most Precious of Cargoes. He talks about why he would never have made it as a live action movie

When the acclaimed French film-maker Michel Hazanavicius was approached by his parents’ best friend, the author and playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg, to adapt his fairytale The Most Precious of Cargoes (2019) into an animated film, he hesitated. The short book is a fable about the Holocaust, and the extraordinary acts of kindness that people are capable of. Although moved by it, Hazanavicius was initially reluctant: he had never made an animated film, and he thought he would never make a film about the Holocaust. The grandson of eastern European immigrants who came to France from Lithuania and Poland in the 1920s, Hazanavicius, 58, had felt that the subject was not his to tell. “It was more my grandparents’ and my parents’ story, not mine,” he says, speaking from his home in the 10th arrondissement, Paris, the sunlight streaming through the window behind him. “I was born in Paris in the late 1960s, and I had a wonderful, very happy childhood.” That period, however, coincided with when Holocaust denial began and survivors, who had until then remained silent, started to speak out about their experiences in the camps. “For many years, the priority [of those seeking to preserve the memory] was hearing testimony from witnesses. And I thought fiction on the subject was not appropriate.”

It was Hazanavicius’s wife, the actor Bérénice Bejo – who starred as Peppy Miller, an ambitious young actress in The Artist, Hazanavicius’s Academy Award-winning film about Hollywood’s black-and-white silent era – who changed his mind. Bejo told him he had not explained enough about his family’s Jewish history to his four children, now aged 26, 23, 16 and 13, and she persuaded Hazanavicius to take on the project, not only for them, but also for other people’s children. “[I realised] that if I hadn’t told my kids stories about my family – how they came to France and what happened during the war – it was likely that other [Jewish parents] hadn’t passed on [their heritage] either.”

Across the country men and women have cared for the resting places of their enemy’s fallen, finding peace and hope

For some, tending the graves was an act of reconciliation. For others, it was about acknowledging shared losses and shared grief.

Thousands of Germans who died in Britain during the first and second world wars were laid to rest in local graveyards. British people tended these graves for decades, even laying flowers and wreaths for their former foes.