Rank #353 in NON FICTION
As a salute to all the many women who fought in World War II, at home, in secret, in the service, we give you this collection of stories of real-life women. Like Agent Peggy Carter, too often their sacrifice and service was...
WWII - British Agent, Special Operations Executive ( S.O.E)
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Behind Enemy Lines With Violette Szabo By Gilbert King
She was young, married and a mother. But after her husband died in battle against the Nazis, she became a secret agent for the British.
In the end, the SS officers brought them out of their barracks and took them on a long walk to a quiet spot behind a crematorium. The three women, spies for Britain's Special Operations Executive, had survived hard labor and inhuman conditions at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for women, where thousands of children perished from starvation, hundreds of women were sterilized, and Jews and Gypsies were maimed or murdered in Nazi medical experiments. By the winter of 1945, with Russian forces approaching, the SS moved quickly to exterminate as many prisoners as possible in an attempt to prevent future testimony of atrocities.
Two of the spies, wireless operators Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe, were so malnourished they had to be carried by stretcher. Clothed in rags, their faces black with dirt and their hair matted, they had withstood torture and interrogation only to find themselves huddled together, freezing as their death sentences were read to them. The third spy, 23-year-old Violette Szabo, was still strong enough to walk. The Germans would save her for last, forcing her to watch as her two friends were made to kneel. An SS sergeant drew a pistol. Szabo went to her knees, taking the hands of her friends. How had it come to this?
Just four years before, she was Violette Bushell, a pretty, Paris-born girl selling perfume at the Bon Marché department store in South London. Then she met Etienne Szabo, a charming, 31-year-old officer with the French Foreign Legion, at a Bastille Day parade, and they married five weeks later. But Etienne soon shipped off to North Africa, where General Erwin Rommell and his Panzer divisions were on the move through the sands of Egypt. Szabo was killed in ber 1942, during the Second Battle of El Alamein. He would posthumously receive the Croix de Guerre, the highest French military award for bravery in battle, but he would never see his daughter, Tania, born to Violette in London just months before he died.
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