Dan Snow's History Hit - Krystyna Skarbek

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

Clare Mulley joined me on the podcast to talk about the extraordinary story of Krystyna Skarbek, who worked as a spy for the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got a true hero on the podcast today. In fact, we've got two. We've got Claire Mulley, brilliant historian, talking about a true hero on the podcast. Christina Skarbek. She is my daughter's favourite spy from the Second World War. You're not going to believe this story. If you've never heard of Christina Skarbek, just sit back and enjoy. She is one of the more remarkable figures to have emerged from that truly extraordinary conflict. She is the subject of a biography written by Claire Mulley. Recently, she's been on talking about the woman who started Save the Children,

Eglantine Jebb. She's also written this amazing joint biography of the two women that were at the heart of the Third Reich's aviation R&D, basically. Extraordinary, extraordinary women. If you want to watch a lot of aviation history, it is available on History Hit TV. You just use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and then you get a month for free and your second month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. It's unbelievably cheap. It takes you through these coming months, which are probably going to be a little bit challenging. So please head over to History Hit TV, use the code POD1, and watch and listen to all that amazing historical

content. In the meantime, everyone, here is Claire Mulley talking about Christina Skarbek. Claire, good to have you back on the podcast. Lovely to be back. Thank you very much. I think this is one of the greatest espionage stories of the Second World War. She's a truly remarkable woman, isn't she? She's absolutely extraordinary. She's a total inspiration for me. And I saw that your daughter did a wonderful picture of her a little while ago.

So I love that as well. But yes, she was not just Britain's first female special agent at the Second War. She was actually the longest serving special agent for Britain, male or female. And I would argue one of the most significant. Her achievements really made a significant impact on the Allied war effort. Where's she from? So she was born in Poland. Her father was an aristocrat, a Roman Catholic Polish aristocrat.

Her mother had been born Jewish, but had converted to marry her dad. And she grew up with a lot of focused attention on her, but she was expected to be a sort of perfect countess, dance polonaises, wear white gloves, that sort of thing. And that wasn't her at all. In fact, her father on their estates taught her to shoot. She rode horses. She always loved the outdoor life and she wanted a life of endeavour and adventure. But she was also brought up to be a passionate Polish patriot and this was you know one of the most defining features of her. She had this passionate love of freedom both for Poland when it came to the Second World War, for her adopted country Britain and for all of the Allies but also for herself personally. That was one of her real motivators. She wanted freedom and independence.

That's fascinating. So her personal journey sort of mapped onto the national story of Poland in the Second War. She was someone individually and also strategically, politically, was struggling for autonomy. Yeah. And in a sense, actually, her life can be seen... I mean, I don't want to make too much of this, but a little bit of a metaphor for Poland, you know, the first of the Allies. She's the first agent serving alongside. But that relationship, of course, changes over time. And at the end of the war, perhaps not Britain's finest moment when it came to Poland or to Christina personally. Although in the long term, we are now honouring her today. And I think the relationship is built again. So there is something in that.

So tell me, how did she become this remarkable agent for Britain? It's a fantastic story right from the get-go. So she was already married to her second husband by September 1939, and they were on their way to Southern Africa for his diplomatic posting when the news came through of the Nazi German invasion of Poland. And they waited for further instructions. None came in the chaos of those early days. So they turned around and got the first ship they could back to Europe they wanted to go back to their country and serve but immediately it was wartime conditions they had to go slowly in convoy and so on and in fact there's a ridiculous story her husband wrote a memoir which I don't recommend but there are some great stories and

one is that on that ship back the captain had a notice board to give instructions to or information to the passengers. And one day it said on this notice board, lost a pair of ladies pink panties. Underneath it said lost Warsaw. And that was how they found that their capital had fallen to the enemy. And he said, perhaps this is a typical example of dry British sense of humour. But for the Poles, it was an appalling way to find out what was happening back in Europe. So by the time the ship docked at Southampton, her husband went off to join the Polish forces, which were reconvening in France at that point and played a significant role there. And he expected her to wait out a couple of months in London, you know, have a cocktail. But within two days, she is banging on the door of the supposedly secret special

intelligence services building in London. So she obviously had her contacts and not so much volunteering as demanding to be taken on and I can just imagine the look on the faces of the young men in there they were all young men of course because first of all she's Polish she's not British so she's disqualified immediately and then she's female and there are no women being taken on in this role. But she's got not only the right languages and the right contacts, she's also got a brilliant plan for how to get into Poland under the radar. Because when she was a rather bored countess before the war, she did a lot of skiing and she used to smuggle cigarettes across the High Tartar Mountains. She knew all the smuggling routes and she didn't even smoke. She didn't need the money. She was just doing it for kicks, for the thrill. And so she knew the Goral mountain people who

were some of the first to resist. She knew how to get in and out under the radar. So they couldn't afford not to take her on. And before Christmas 1939, that early, she was in position in Hungary, ready to go on her first mission. There was also a charisma, a beauty that made it almost impossible not to just fall in love with her. Well, yes. I mean, my book is called The Spy Who Loved, and that's because she loved adrenaline and adventure. In fact, the British minister in Budapest said she had a pathological love of danger. He definitely fell in love with her. I've seen his love letters to her, which are very romantic. She loved, she loved men. So she had two husbands. She had many lovers, many of whose

lives she actually saved during the war because she worked alongside them. She saved possibly six different individual men's lives and who knows how many more through her achievements. But above all, she loved freedom and independence. But of course, she she's presented often as this very seductive character. Before the war, she was a Polish beauty queen and she was a miski and all that sort of thing. But she was just doing it to fill the time, really. It's not her most important characteristic. and all that sort of thing but she was just doing it to fill the time really it's not her most important characteristic and she had when she wanted she had this great charisma and she used that like all the other skills she had to good effect but she could turn it off and become completely anonymous so she could sort of disappear in a crowd if she wanted to as well

she which was actually one of her most important skills because the reason they sent women out was not to do a matahari or to be a honey trap. They sent women out because women are ignored. Women have that special magic skill of being invisible. So the Nazi Germans just, if they saw an able-bodied man moving behind enemy lines, moving around France, for example, they obviously would question them. She went out. She was stopped once by the Gestapo. They searched the man next to her. She had some hand grenades in her knapsack under some cheese sandwiches, they didn't look.

You know, women could move around because they were looking after families and running businesses, sort of under the Nazi German radar, so that's partly why they sent her out, that her courage and contacts and so on. She's extraordinarily hardy, physically fit, able, she knows everyone, she speaks the languages, she's got all these other skills. What are the kind of missions she goes on? Well, I mean, it's extraordinary. She worked in three different theatres of the war.

I mean, she didn't have to serve at all. They estimated a six-week life expectancy for her when they trained her up as a wireless operator, because obviously the Nazi Germans could pin the signals and then track the wireless transmitters. But she mainly went out as a courier. And so her first theatre was Eastern Europe. She had four missions into Nazi-occupied Poland. She was bringing in

money for the fledgling resistance, propaganda, information, and so on. She made the first contact between the Polish resistance and the Brits. And she would then go on her own research tour. So she would see where the German tanks and troops were massing she would see where they were going to be deployed what the conditions were what was happening to the Jewish community in Poland and she reported back on all of this as well but in in that area that arena the most important thing she did was she smuggled some microfilm taken by an independent Polish resistance group called the Musketeers which showed the massing of tanks and troops on the then German side of the German Soviet border iniet border in the spring of 1941, and the creation of a series of fuel and ammunition dumps, clearly to support a land-based invasionary army. So this was the

first film evidence of German plans for Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of their erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. And she knew the importance of this, so she hid it inside her gloves. She smuggled it across more than one border and eventually got it to the British attache in Sofia. He got it to Churchill. And when Churchill saw it, he had it checked through his ultra sources, so Enigma. He believed it and he got in touch with Stalin on that basis. So this, the information she's smuggling is not small fry stuff. I mean, this had the potential to change the course of the war. And at that point, Churchill actually told his daughter, Sarah, that Christine was his favourite spy. I mean, this is just the start, actually. She's arrested a couple of times there. But then the work that made her most legendary was not in Eastern Europe

or Egypt and the Middle East, but in occupied France in 1944. That's where her real achievements took place. You mentioned she got arrested. What do you mean she got arrested? You don't want to get arrested as a Polish aristocrat. There's about five different reasons why she did not want to get arrested. So exactly. She was caught twice, once in Poland and once in Hungary, and managed to talk her way out. I mean, how incredible speed of thought under situations of intense stress. So she was captured once in the mountains with another Polish courier called Wladimir Ledochowski. And the two of them were kept under armed guard while a train station master who had found them went to get the Gestapo.

And the guards went through all her bags and so on. And she realised that they were not motivated by politics, these men, because as soon as they came across any of these bundles of money she was given to give to the resistance, they divvied it up between themselves and put it in their pockets. So she was wearing under her collar a cut glass necklace that Vladimir had given to her as a love token, actually, which she always wore under her shirt so that one of her other lovers didn't see it. And now she got it out and started fiddling with it and saying, oh, my diamonds. Of course, they weren't diamonds at all. It was a cheap necklace. But the guards didn't know that. So they lunged it and as they did she pulled the string and these beads fell into the grass the wet grass and the two men lunged to get these diamonds as they thought they were before they would disappear and she kicked

the garden out of the way and she and Vladimir ran into the forest and managed to successfully get away I mean that's just one account there's another in Hungary, she and Andrzej Kowalski, another resistance hero who served Britain, actually, as a special agent, later known as Andrew Kennedy, were both arrested and taken away for quite brutal interrogation. And at that point, when you are, you know, arrested by the Gestapo and in a prison being interrogated, normally that is it. But Christine, by this point, had caught a bit of a cough. She was getting a flu and she decided to make a virtue of her apparent weakness, which was this hacking cough that she had. And so she well, I looked in the British files and the report in the British archives simply says that Christine showed great presence of mind. And what that meant was she she bit her own tongue so hard and repeatedly that it bled copiously and as she coughed it looked as if she was coughing up blood

which is the symptom of TB tuberculosis and the Germans were rightly terrified of the disease and threw both him and Christine out and thereby saving their you know she saved their lives and they got away across the border actually she got smuggled across in the um uh polish and british ambassadors in the boot of his car across the border so i mean that's just two of the occasions there's there's plenty more land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether

you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week just completely extraordinary. But you mentioned that her best work was probably done in the West. So tell me about that. Yes, so she was parachuted into France in the summer of 1944. And her brief was to support and serve as courier to a man called Francis Kamertz, actually Michael Morpurgo's uncle.

And he was the SOE coordinator in the south of France, preparing with the French resistance for the Allied Liberation Forces coming in in D-Day in the south, which, as you may know, happened a couple of weeks after D-Day in Normandy. They were largely American and some British forces coming in. So they had to keep various roads open, shut other routes and so on, arrange the communications locally. They'd been caught up in a battle, the Battle of Vercors, which Paddy Ashdown wrote about memorably. And then after that, Christine made her own way. And two of her biggest achievements, I think, three with the microfilm I mentioned,

but in this arena was that she went up into the mountains and she made the first contact between the French resistance in the area and the Italian partisans on the other side of the Alps. She heard a gun battle and managed to circle around until she went to the Italian side and made contact with Giordano, who was the Italian leader in the area, and took back his request for ammunition, shoes and packed meat. That's what he wanted, apparently, for his resistance army so she could get those supplies to him. And then while she was in the mountains as well she made some investigations and discovered that there was a German garrison that had a significant number of conscripted Poles serving under the Nazis. They were partly forced into service by threats to their families, some of them were ethnic Germans and so on. So a variety of different groups. And she risked everything by climbing up the mountain from the back end of the garrison. So the German generals wouldn't see her wearing a white and red scarf, which are the colours of Poland. And she was obviously highlighting herself not as a local

peasant woman, but to show them she wanted to talk pole to pole. And amazingly amazingly they let her up to the top and she spoke to them for a couple of hours and persuaded them to take the breach blocks out of the big guns to bring back the small arms and she secured the defection of that garrison on this important pass called the col de l'arche pass in the alps and then she came down from the mountain discovered three of the main men she worked with and fruging francis commerz had been arrested and on her own secured their release just hours before they were due to be executed, shot in a football field and got all three men out. So that's some of it. Surely she was one of the best intelligence agents irrespective of her sex. I mean, she was one of the best in the Second World War. I mean, extraordinary stories.

Yeah, absolutely. I think her contribution was very significant. The microfilm for Operation Barbarossa and then the work in Southern France in particular, although she also had some active service in the Middle East as well and did some sort of espionage-based work, really, rather than special operations there as well. So it's an incredibly impressive six years' missions. And she was, of course, given very high honours.

She was given the OBE and the George Medal by Britain. And the French gave her also the Croix de Guerre with one star. So yes, it is this significant contribution. But I think it's important that we do talk about it in the context of her gender, because that's partly why she's been so much forgotten, really. Why then was she forgotten? Is it because her life after the war was complicated and therefore didn't make for the ideal press copy? Part of all those things. I mean, at the end of the war, she was given these honours, very high-level honours, but she actually refused to accept them because she wasn't given what she would have valued more highly,

which was ongoing British citizenship or ongoing work worthy of her service and experience. So she'd been serving under a temporary British passport, which had been renewed repeatedly during the war since around 1941. At the end of the war, they just didn't renew it. And she was left high and dry in Cairo. And she actually said, you know, she knew she couldn't go back to Poland, which now had this Soviet-backed communist regime. And her brother, who had fought in the resistance during the war, he actually died in the first year of the peace in a communist jail in Warsaw. So she knew she couldn't go back. And

the British knew she couldn't go back, because at one point they'd actually traded her name for the name of an NKVD operative. So if she'd have gone back, she'd have been arrested immediately and almost certainly executed. So she was left high and dry without citizenship. And she actually said to Britain, I refuse to accept these honours unless you make me a citizen of your country. Now, she put her life on the line for six years. So she kind of was shamed into becoming a British citizen. But I think even then she kind of falls between the gaps because for the British, she was almost too Polish to be really British. For the Poles, she had, you know, she served Britain directly. So was she more of a British agent? She was a woman working in a field that most people at the time considered a male field. So she was too female to be male. But then after the war, she was, you know,

she didn't sort of fit anywhere. She was part Jewish. And so she fell between the gaps. And a lot of that is to do with her gender as well. Even today, when we remember women in the resistance and the female special agents specifically, we tend to focus on their beauty. And I've got to say, not all of them were beautiful.

You don't have to be beautiful to be a special agent. fact they were the massively diverse group we had one with one leg although she was quite beautiful we had grandmothers all sorts we focus on their beauty we focus on their courage and sometimes for paying the ultimate sacrifice you know and we need to of course recognize and honor those things but what we're less good at talking about is the women's achievements and you cannot get a better example of that than Christina Scarbeck, Christine Granville, for being so effective in the role, and many of the women were. So I think because she was so effective, but she did survive the war, she's had less attention than perhaps some of the others. Tell me briefly about her death, because it's just so bloody tragic.

Seven years after the end of the war, 1952, Christina was living in London. She'd had various not brilliant jobs. She'd been a hat check girl and a waitress, and she was working as a bathroom stewardess on the Union Castle shipping lines. I think that gave her some sort of freedom and travel that she wouldn't have had otherwise. And the captain on one of the ships she'd served on had said if any any of the staff had received any honours during the war they should wear their medals so she put on this incredible array of ribbons you know the quad the ger the george medal the obe she had all these four different service medals and the war medal i mean it's incredible array and the other people on the

ship they just didn't like it they were like who is this woman who's got these medals you know obviously she's stolen them or you know she had quite a strong Polish accent so how come is she Jewish you know and she was treated horrendously it's just so appalling and that's why different nationalities serving on that ship so except one man stood up for her was another bathroom steward and they became friends for a while but some months later back in Britain she had her circles of you know Polish war heroes stuck in London of British SOE agents who she served with and this guy didn't fit in with that group he was jealous he was difficult he was quite possessive and nobody is going to possess Christine so she dumps him and he can't

bear it and he unfortunately became her stalker he He followed her. He wrote to her obsessively. She burned his letters. And eventually he confronted her by surprise. She wasn't expecting him. And he came to where she was living. And he stabbed her through the heart with a commando knife. She died within seconds. Just after all that, she was given six weeks life expectancy.

She served for around six years, the entire war. And then that was her end. And the greatest tragedy, of course, is that she never lived to see her country, her birth country, Poland, free again. So tragic. You wrote a book a while ago about this. Tell us the name of the book. There it is.

The Spy Who Loved. Because she loved freedom and independence and other things too. Why are we talking about her now? Because yesterday, about six years after I first proposed it, I'm absolutely delighted to unveil a new English Heritage blue plaque to Christina Skarbek, Christine Granville. It's at the, it's still a hotel actually, it used to be a hotel in London in South Kent run by the Polish Relief Society which helped Poles stuck in Britain without income and now it's a hotel called Number One Lexham Gardens Hotel.

And it went up yesterday. So you can see it there on the wall on the first floor outside the room where she stayed. Well, it's a huge achievement. So well done, you. Thank you very much for coming back on this podcast. Thanks, Dan. Thank you very much.

Cheers. hi everyone it's me Dan Snow just a quick request it's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this but now I'm doing it I hate myself please please go on to iTunes wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and review it it really helps basically boosts up the chart which is good and then more people listen which is nice so if you could do that I'd be very grateful I understand if you don't subscribe to my tv channel i understand if you're not by my calendar but this is free come on do me a favor thanks