True Crime Campfire - Resistance: Spy Krystyna Skarbek Pt 1

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

James Belushi once wrote, “Heroes aren’t born, they’re cornered.” It’s often extraordinary, and sometimes horrifying, circumstance that compels a person into actions they’d never have imagined previously. This week’s story is about a woman who was faced with horrors and discovered she had the courage to fight them. Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy tickets.   Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027. Sources: The Spy Who Loved, Clare Mulley Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. James Belushi once wrote, Heroes aren't born, they're cornered.

It's often extraordinary and sometimes horrifying circumstances that compel a person into actions they'd never have imagined before. This week's story is about a woman who was faced. with horrors and discovered, she had the courage to fight them. This is part one of Resistance, the life of Christina Scarbeck. So, campers, we're starting this one on August 17, 1944, in the town of Dina France. France. The Nazi officer marched the three captives out of the prison gates, his pistol ready by his side, a thin rain falling.

The prisoners expected to be herded toward the football field where executions took place, but to their shock, the officer took them in the other direction instead. What a wonderful woman you have, he said to one of the prisoners. He led them over to a car and ordered them into the back, then got in and gave the driver instructions. The roads into the town were blocked, but with an official vehicle racing at them, the guards stood aside and let it through.

After the first bend, the car stopped. Against the white wall of a farm building stood a woman, and the prisoners suddenly knew they'd been rescued. Christina had rescued them, just as she had helped rescue thousands of others during the war. Maria Christina Janina Scarbeck was born in Warsaw on May 1, 1908. At the time, and for over a century beforehand, there was no Polish state,

with the nation divided up between foreign powers, mainly Russia and Germany. So Warsaw was nominally in Russia when Christina was born, but the people there still very much considered themselves Polish, living under a long occupation. Her family was patriotic nobility. Her father, Count Yeja Scarbeck, proudly traced his lineage back to a medieval shoemaker who had killed a dragon by tricking it into eating a sheepskin filled with sulfur, which made the beast so thirsty that it drank water until it burst. I hate it when that happens.

Yeja was almost a cliche of European nobility of the time. his interests being, and probably in this order, horses, dogs, drinking, gambling, and women. He was impulsive and terrible with money, and although he inherited plenty of land and property, there wasn't a whole lot of actual cash in the family. Horses and gambling are not exactly cheap hobbies, and by his mid-20s, Yezsche was drowning in debt. There's an age-old solution for poverty-stricken aristocratic families, marry someone rich. Yezsche's family arranged for him to marry Stefania Goldfeeder, the daughter of a wealthy banking family. His family got financial relief, and hers got connection to one of Poland's oldest families.

Arranged marriages are not necessarily a recipe for happiness, and they were not a well-matched couple. Stefania was kind, educated, and intellectual, and Yeza was a hard-drinking, back-slapping joke-telling outdoorsy type. As the marriage grew older, he drank even more. and his jokes with his friends were increasingly anti-Semitic about his Jewish wife and her family. Their first child, Ange, was a quiet, gentle kid who took after his mother. Yehja didn't make much effort to hide his disappointment. Eight years later, Christina arrived, and it was soon clear that she took after her father, energetic and fearless. When she was three, the family moved to a country estate, and she had an extremely privileged outdoorsy childhood,

mostly allowed to run wild. She learned to ride when she could barely walk. Her father adored her, and that affection was returned, not least because Yehshu was home less and less often, so his visits became special and exciting. Disneyland Dad, you know. Christina was very much a daddy's girl. When she was 12, her dad took some friends over to show off his stables

and discovered that his ferocious black stallion, Satan, was missing. The last person to ride him had been thrown, breaking both his legs. I think the problem is that you named him Satan. It's like I've never met a well-behaved dog named Loki. Like they're all psychopaths. He'd probably be less of an asshole if you named him Ralph or something. Definitely. Oh, my God.

Christina had been, of course, forbidden to ride him. So obviously, after a couple minutes, they saw Satan trotting back with Christina calmly sitting on his back. By this time, Poland had finally become independent after the end of World War I and was in the process of beating back an invasion by a newly communist Russia. There were stories of patriotic heroism everywhere, which made a deep impression on Christina. When she was 14, with the nation finally stable and at peace, Christina's parents felt it was safe to send her to a convent school hundreds of miles away. She wasn't happy there. Get out, right? This was a school for aristocratic girls, many of whom looked down at Christina for her Jewish heritage.

And the aim of the place was not so much to educate as it was to stamp out future Stepford wives, which a natural rebel like Christina found just insufferable. She wasn't there for long, though, because she set a priest on fire. All right, all right, it wasn't as bad as it sounds. The girls had to attend mass every morning before breakfast. standing with candles while the priest droned on through his catechism. One morning, Christina had the sudden thought, is he pious enough to carry on talking even if his cassock is on fire?

I think that's a question we've all asked ourselves in church, right? She wasn't a girl who wasted much time once she had a great idea. She thought the cassock would just smolder, but it went up like a dry Christmas tree, and she immediately helped beat out the flames. The priest apparently thought the whole thing was hilarious, but the mother superior did not. And Christina was expelled. I mean, fair enough.

You know, I feel like if you set a guy on fire, most schools are probably going to show you the door. I love that the priest thought it was funny. I know, even if the victim finds it hilarious. I'm sure, I'm sure he, like, she probably was very honest and was like, I was just wondering if you would keep preaching, even if you were on. fire, and he probably thought that was delightful. She's a scientist. Yeah, exactly. Years of war had sent shockwaves through the Polish economy. Soon, the family farms were no longer profitable, and when the bank owned by Christina's grandparents went under, her parents were forced to auction off their land and property. By the time she was 21, she was living with her mother and brother in a

Warsaw apartment. It can be tough for a daddy's girl to realize that maybe daddy isn't that great. Yeusia abandoned his family and started living with another woman, splitting his time between drinking benches and stints and health spas to recover. In 1930, when Christina was 22, he died of tuberculosis. Christina was torn. She was a pretty young woman from a noble family. The traditional route for her to lift her family out of trouble was to use that beauty and pedigree to land a rich husband.

But what Christina wanted to do was hang out in the cinemas and cafes of a newly bohemian Warsaw, making friends with artists and poets. But she couldn't stand the thought of being a burden to her mom, so she took an office job at the big Fiat car dealership in town. Christina had a lot of great qualities, some heroic ones even. But she was also kind of a snob and easily bored. She didn't like working at fiat at all, and the job was slowly killing her with exhaust fumes from the garage smoking up into the offices. Still, whether by accident or design, she picked a job where she was guaranteed to meet wealthy young men, and she caught the eye of Gustav Getlitz,

who was four years older than Christina and the director of a curtain company. Gustav was a sensible guy and wanted to take the next step in his sensible life. An aristocratic wife who would boost his social standing and entertain his clients, as well as cook all his meals and provide them with children, seemed ideal. Christina was a bad fit for all of that except entertaining, and Gustav was a bad fit for her too. But having grown up in easy luxury, Christina felt a need for financial security. She took Gustav out to the movies and fancy restaurants and completely bowled him over.

Because of her new respiratory issues, on doctor's orders, they visited the mountain resort town of Zakopan, close to the Slovakian border, where probably not on doctors' orders, they drank, smoked, and listened to live jazz. Zacopan would become one of the central points of Christina's life. Back in Warsaw, she entered the Miss Polonia contest, a beauty pageant voted on by readers of the Morning Express newspaper. Christina had some glam photos taken at a studio for her entry, and although she didn't win, she made the short list and was declared a national star of beauty. This was apparently enough to convince Gustav that he had a real catch, and he immediately proposed, and the couple got married in April of 1930.

They both realized they'd made a mistake, almost. immediately. Christina still went out to nightclubs and cafes and cinemas with zero interest in being either a homemaker or mother. Gustav was perceptive enough to realize that her need for constant activity and entertainment stemmed from insecurity, but that didn't make her any easier to live with. He wasn't easy either. He was consumed by his work and spent almost no time with her. Christina took every chance she could to take the train down to Zacupon and ski. Just for the thrill of it, she started smuggling cigarettes into Poland over the mountains, dodging border patrols and developing skills that would be very useful later in her life.

In 1931, she was declared Miss Ski in Zakopan, and apparently Gustav made all his major life choices around Christina's beauty pageant results. He realized that she was a free bird he could not change. They separated and soon divorced. Her alimony was enough for Christina to get a small apartment in central Warsaw and enjoy the bohemian life, flirting with writers and artists and zipping down to Zacupon whenever she could. Also in Zacopan was Yeja Gajitsky, a moody adventurous type whose wandering career had included stints as a cowboy and gold prospector in the U.S., a secretary and possibly

spy at the Polish embassy in Washington, and a photographer in West Africa before he came home to Poland and somewhat settled down in the mountains. Damn. One day, both he and Christina separately decided to go skiing in a blizzard. Christina lost control of her skis and Yeja raced after her. He rescued her by just picking her up and carrying her. Ooh, sexy. Another version of the story has him using his cowboy skills to lasso her,

like a runaway steer, but that seems kind of unlikely to me. Like, why would he be skiing with a lasso, you know? Anyway, he took her to get some vodka to call her. calm her nerves and they hid it off, despite Yeja pushing 50 and being more than 20 years older than than her. As he succinctly wrote later on, we liked each other, and despite some considerable difference in our ages, we became lovers, then we got married. Yeza had a lot in common with both Christina and his namesake, her late father, although without her dad's bitter edge and prejudices. The couple were both charismatic and unpredictable, active and sometimes difficult people. They traveled

throughout Europe, spending a lot of time in France. Christina, like most Polish aristocrats, spoke perfect French. At the end of 1938, the Polish Foreign Office asked Yehja to start preparations to open a consulate in Kenya. Before the trip, he and Christina spent weeks in London. Christina, starting to feel a little restless with their intense and socially demanding marriage, spent most of the time by herself, seeking out old writer friends from Warsaw and getting nostalgic for the freedom to live her own life. Still, she sailed out with Jezsche, and two weeks later, they landed in Cape Town, ready for a 2,500-mile car journey to Nairobi. They reached Johannesburg at the end of August, and were still there on September 1, 1939, when, with no declaration of war,

Nazi Germany invaded Poland with a million and a half troops. They would be outside of Warsaw in just one week. Within three weeks of the German invasion from the West, the Soviet Union invaded from the East as part of the secret deal they'd made with the Nazis to divide Poland between them. Britain and France declared war on Germany, but were either unwilling to or incapable of providing the kind of military support that would have mattered. Just 35 days after the invasion had begun, Poland was controlled by its two oldest enemies. Stunned and terrified, for their friends and family, Christina and Yeja turned their car around and raced back to Cape Town to catch a ship for Southampton. For both of them, being stuck thousands of miles away and

unable to help defend their homeland was a nightmare, made worse by German submarines that forced their ship home into a slow convoy that didn't reach Britain until October 6th, the same day that the last significant military force in Poland surrendered. But there was still a Polish army, regrouping in France, and there would soon be a government in exile. The war is over and both sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders, an army scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight.

But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins. This is old-school adventuring at its most cruel. Your torch ticks down in real time, and when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job. This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make. This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s, and man, it is so good to be back. Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the Shadow Dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on YouTube.com slash the Glass Cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark. From the parents behind law and order comes a mystery the whole family can enjoy.

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The whole family can listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Yisha traveled to Paris to try and sign up, but much to his disgust, he was rejected due to being over 50 and still plagued by the after effects of several serious ski injuries. On a long voyage to Southampton, Christina had come up with her own way to aid her homeland, with a plan to ski into Poland across the Carpathian Mountains from Hungary, with British propaganda material to take to Warsaw, using the smugglers' contact she made in her youth. The Nazis were doing their best to discourage the huge Polish resistance movement by telling them they'd been abandoned by their allies,

and anything that counteracted that effort had real value. The day she landed in Southampton, Christina took the train to, to London. And the day after that, she was in touch with the Secret Intelligence Service. A lot of the time with secret spy stuff, it's impossible to know exactly how everything happened. And that includes Christina's quick introduction to British intelligence. Both she and Yeja knew Freddie Voigt, a British journalist who had covered the rise of Nazi Germany and spent a lot of time in Poland. And Voigt was connected with a huge number of people in British intelligence and diplomacy.

Most likely, Christina took her plan to Voigt and Voigt introduced her to the right people. The Brits were immediately impressed with her. A December report described her as a flaming Polish patriot, expert skier, and great adventurous. She is absolutely fearless. In fact, one of her Polish friends later wrote that Christina was, quote, hugely afraid of accusations of being a coward and therefore demanded more of herself than anyone around her. That drive to prove herself would be invaluable to the British. The agents for the SIS were theoretically anonymous and hidden behind code names and false identities, which was a little ridiculous because this was Britain in the mid-20th century and almost all of their recruits had

gone to the same posh schools and knew each other on site. And these weren't positions you applied for. SIS approached likely candidates rather than the other way around. Christina just marching in and saying, I can help you, was unheard of. Wow. There were ridiculous elements, but for the most part, these were very competent and brave people. Field work in occupied countries, like Christina's proposal, would soon be taken over by Churchill's new special operations executive, the SOE, and it was terrifyingly dangerous work. Around 25% of male operatives wouldn't come home.

Christina was the first of many female SOE agents, and the work was even more dangerous for them. One in three, maybe even more, of these agents would be killed in action, most of them executed by the Nazis after capture. For Christina, both a pole and a Jew, capture would almost certainly be fatal. On December 20th, Christina's plan was approved, and the next day, after a tearful departure from Yuzha,

she flew to Paris to catch a train to Budapest Hungary, which would be her base of operations. Her recovery was as a French journalist, which was entirely believable. Hungary and Romania were, for the moment, the nearest non-involved countries to the war action, and were chock full of foreign Germans. Her initial connection and guide was a Polish journalist and agent named Yosef Redminsky,

who already knew Christina and was utterly infatuated with her. This apparently, like any man who meets this woman, is just immediately smitten. She must have had some magic. I don't know. He introduced her to journalists and diplomats and was obviously having fun squiring her around town, which Christina immediately found irritating and ditched him as soon as she could to work on her own, securing papers and supplies for her first trip across the border into Poland. Most people were coming the other way, an endless stream of refugees fleeing the Nazis to Hungary, which early on in the war was friendly to Poland.

Among them was a lieutenant named Anjay Kowerski, who she had first met in the family stables when they were children, and again later in Zakupon when they were both skiing. He had just survived an avalanche then, and would not be skiing much longer, because a friend accidentally shot him in the leg on a hunting trip, and it had to be amputated below the knee. Good God.

He wore a wooden leg with metal clamps and switched his need for speed from horses and skis to fast cars. After the German invasion, Anjé joined the motorized Black Brigade, leading daring attacks against the invaders and winning Poland's highest honor for valor. After one battle, he was found alive, but with his leg pinned beneath a smoking tank. tank. He told the worried officer who found him, I don't want a doctor, you idiot, I want a blacksmith.

It was his prosthetic leg beneath the tank. He was fine. It's just a delightfully cartoonish story. Everything in this is just like, how is this real? His unit was captured, but Ange managed to steal a German officer's car and lead his brigade to Hungary. As combatants in a neutral country, they were interred in a camp under the Geneva Convention, theoretically for the remainder of the war. But most of the guards were sympathetic to the Poles, and Ange soon escaped, coming back a few nights later to spring the rest of his unit. His unit started the long journey to join the rest of the Polish in France, via the Middle East, but Ange was ordered to stay in Budapest and help as many Polish soldiers and officers get out across the border as possible, and to transport them

hundreds of miles to Yugoslavia. When Christina met Angey in Budapest, he was telling war stories in a back room, which she, a fervent patriot, listened to with tears in her eyes. Afterwards, she explained her involvement with British intelligence and suggested they talk about it more the following evening. Then she laughed and said, I'm inviting you out for dinner. This is how spies ask each other out, right? You've probably already guessed that Ange was Christina's kind of guy, and I'm sure you remember that she was married.

When Christina's story first started to get widespread attention, there were efforts by those close to her to, as they thought of it, protect her reputation. When something of the truth started to come out, it was quickly exaggerated to make it seem like she was just jumping into bed with everybody she met, like she was a female James Bond. Now, obviously, we don't know everything she did every day, but it's something. fair to say that she liked men, she liked sex, and seeing as throughout the war she was in near constant danger of violent death, she didn't hesitate long when she caught feelings for somebody, and I do not blame her. Ever heard the expression, live every day like it's your last? You know, makes a lot of sense in a situation like this one. Her first dinner with Ange, anyway, would have to wait, as he was called away to help with a difficult border crossing.

They had dinner the next day, and Christina invited him to spend the... night in her apartment, which he did. Christina's mission into Poland kept being delayed because the Polish intelligence services were unsure about her. Another wrinkle was dryly summed up in a British report. Her attractiveness appeared to be causing some difficulty in Budapest. I'd say that's a little bit of understatement. Joseph Raziminski, the journalist who had greeted and guided her when she first arrived in the city, the guy she found annoying, had continued his obsessive pursuit of Christina,

which finally reached a breaking point when he showed up at her apartment and pointed a gun at his own crotch, saying he was going to shoot his dick off. I mean, don't threaten me with a good time, my dude. Yeah, just what every woman wants to hear. Sleep with me or I'll mutilate my own genitals. That's what we all dream of as little girls when we're playing with our Barbies, you know.

He changed his mind the last second and shot himself in the foot instead. Well, of course. When he could walk, he threw himself off the Elizabeth Bridge, but the Danube was mostly frozen, and he landed on ice, breaking his good leg. I guess I shouldn't laugh. It's just so absurd. Come on. I know.

I know. Like, my guy, you got to get some therapy. Bless your heart. And all of this was catching a lot more attention than any intelligence operation wanted, and Joseph was quickly replaced. Good choice. Fired for being too down bad, I guess. Yeah. In February of 1940, Christina finally started her first mission into Poland,

where she would soon be guided by Jan Marushaj, a former Olympic skier who now worked as a mountain courier for the exiled Polish military. The plan was to cross the mountains of Slovakia and ski down to her old haunt of Zakopan. Yan thought she was insane. The border was heavily guarded, and it was the worst winter he could remember, with 12 feet of snow and temperatures of minus 30.

But she talked him into making the attempt, and a week later they took a train into Czechoslovakia, jumping out onto the snow before the train reached the station. They climbed into the freezing mountains for two days, spending the night in wooden shacks Jan knew, sleeping huddled together in their clothes. The next evening, a blizzard hit, and they took shelter in a hut as the wind screamed outside.

Christina was woken by desperate human cries and woke Jan. She opened the door to swirling wind and snow. The cries were unmistakable, but there was no way to tell where they were coming from. Christina shouted back, and Jan had to restrain her from going out to try and find the source of the voices. There was barely a few feet of visibility outside, and there was no chance of her finding her way back to the hut if she went out. The next morning the weather was clear, and they continued their ascent up the mountains. Before long, they found the frozen bodies of a young man and woman, huddled together under a pine tree and holding hands. They were refugees trying to escape the Nazi occupation.

Later, Christina would learn that 30 people had died in the blizzard that night as they tried to leave the country. In the spring, when the snow melted, the Nazis would double their patrols in the area because they discovered so many bodies of people who had tried to escape. Christina and Jan had carried their skis and poles all the way up to the mountains, which was a burden that provided a quick reward as they zipped down the snowy slopes into Poland. Jan took them to his parents' house where Christina slept for a full day. A few days later, with new clothes and makeup, she got on the train to Warsaw, with her rucksack holding a stack of propaganda material wrapped in paper.

This was Nazi-occupied Poland. During the journey, she saw armed guards moving through the train, making spot checks and going through the people's belongings. She thought quickly. Maybe she could throw the incriminating documents out of the train. Maybe she could jump out of the train herself and escape. Both seemed impossible to achieve without attracting attention, and were out of the question altogether when the door to her compartment opened and the Gestapo officer came in and sat down.

Christina changed tactics, flashing the officer a smile and a flirty look. They soon got to chatting, and Christina confessed that she was carrying a packet, of black market tea for her poor sick mother. And she was worried she'd get in trouble with the approaching guards when they found it. Faced with the inescapable trap of Pretty Lady need help, the officer offered to hide the package in his suitcase, returning it to Christina when they reached Warsaw. Because it was useful to them, the Nazis had left the Warsaw train station mostly untouched. Other than that, the center of the city was a wreck with rubble and ruined buildings everywhere.

The Nazi jackboot fell hardest on Poland. The entire population of Warsaw lived under permanent threat of arrest, torture, and execution. You could be shot for saying something bad about the Nazis, or just for not getting out of the way of a soldier on the sidewalk. Officially, for every one German killed, 100 Poles would be executed in reprisal, but the number was usually far higher. The names of the victims would be broadcast from loudspeakers across the city. There was strict rationing of food based on the recipient's degree of German ethnicity and their ability to work. Poles were forbidden from owning radios or publishing any uncensored materials. The Nazis controlled education in the city, with Himmler decrying that Polish children should be taught only to count to 500 to write their name and to know that by divine order they owed obedience to the Germans.

Barf. Heavy-handed stuff like this hardly ever works. It just provides the population with a common enemy. As the Germans squeezed more tightly, it only made the Polish resistance more determined. Poland was the only occupied nation that never had a significant problem with locals collaborating with the Nazis, and it was the most dangerous posting for Germans other than the front line, especially for officers who were often assassinated. There were many well-organized resistance groups, not all of whom trusted or cooperated with each other,

and it was these that Christina had been sent to with her propaganda stuff. First, though, she went to find her mother. As brutal as the German occupation of Warsaw was in general, everything was worse for the city's large Jewish population. Jews were required by law to register their ethnicity with the authorities, then crammed into the newly established ghetto, where all, Almost half a million people had to live in less than one and a half square miles. Starvation and disease were rife. Before long, the Nazis would start transporting the ghetto's population to death camps,

but it was already an incredibly dangerous place to live. Not as dangerous as living outside the ghetto, though, where any Jewish person could be shot by the authorities. Stefania Starbeck, Christina's mom, was still living quietly out in the suburbs. She had refused to register as a Jew and be moved into the ghetto, convinced that her noble surname and decades-old conversion to Catholicism would protect her. This was early in the war, and the full extent of the Nazi's barbarity wouldn't be known for a long time, but Christina's work in intelligence gave her a better idea than most about what was going on.

She begged her mom to leave Warsaw, but Stefania refused, despite the danger. That danger didn't only come from her Jewish hands. heritage. She taught at a secret school, providing children with a real education, rather than the stunted version mandated by the Nazis. The last time the Nazis had uncovered a school like that, they had immediately hanged the teachers from the balcony. She refused to flee the city. I know Christina was a daddy's girl, but I think she might have taken after her mama too. Absolutely. And there are schools like that in Afghanistan, by the way, like Taliban occupied. And women have been executed for trying to teach.

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Better never stops. Welcome to Mick Unplugged, the number one podcast for self-improvement and modern leadership. I'm Mick Hunt, your host, and I'm here to challenge your why and fuel your because. This is where leaders, entrepreneurs, and go-getters come to level up. Each week, I bring you unfiltered conversations, game-changing strategies, and the kind of motivation that transforms lives and legacies. I've learned from legends like Les Brown, Damon John, and Robert Irvine. And now I'm bringing their lessons, along with mine, straight to you.

From modern leadership tips to creating unstoppable momentum, this is the podcast that redefines what's possible. Hit play, subscribe, and join the millions who've made Mick Unplug their go-to source for growth and greatness, because your next breakthrough is just one episode away. This is Mick Unplugged, the voice and face of modern leadership entrepreneur, and self-improvement. Let's get started. Christina distributed her propaganda materials to resistance groups and spent three more weeks in Warsaw. Many of the groups were suspicious of her, either as an unknown quantity or because she worked

for the British who had their own agenda, but she made solid connections with one group who called themselves the musketeers, and when she left, she'd be carrying a microfilm of photographs they'd taken of German activity. Then one day she was having coffee in a crowded cafe when someone recognized her, calling out across the room, Christina, what are you doing here? We heard you'd gone abroad. This was not good. Christina was well known as the wife of a Polish diplomat, which alone would make her a target for the Nazi authorities, and because she was Jewish, she was in danger of immediate

arrest and execution. She calmly told her old acquaintance that they were mistaken and ordered more coffee to show that she wasn't alarmed. But she left Warsaw that night and spent two weeks crisscrossing Poland by train, gathering intelligence on industrial activity and German movements from local resistance groups. She briefly returned to Warsaw to collect the microfilm the musketeers had prepared for her. They also had prepared an alternate route for her to take back to Budapest, as Zakopan was crawling with Nazis. Her guide was Count Vladimir Littachowski, an army officer who had joined the

resistance and as an excellent skier worked as a courier between Warsaw and the Polish embassy in Budapest. I love this skiing spy thing. I never pictured a skiing spy. Like there's a movie in there, right? Oh, 100%. Come up with a title. I know you guys can come up with something good. What would we title the skiing spy movie? They caught a train heading into the mountains and at dusk as it slowed down for the station, they jumped off and ran for the woods. Guards shot at them from the train, but they reached the safety of the trees. They hiked in darkness along forest trails for hours before they passed the posts, marking the border with Slovakia. After weeks under constant threat of capture and death,

and having just been shot at, Christina was safe, and she felt an enormous sense of relief. When Vladimir planted a celebratory kiss on her lips, she responded enthusiastically. Like, holy shit, near-death experience makeout, right? Yeah, no kidding. The next night they slept together in the mountains, and after a train took them to Budapest, Christina took Vladimir out to dinner. That's her move. And then back to her apartment for the night. Of course, she already had a Budapest lover, Anjé, who happened to be an acquaintance of Count Vladimir. So all this might get super messy. But in the end, it only got a little messy. Both men quickly figured out what was going on, and the three of them settled into a kind of unspoken

arrangement. When Anjay was in town, Christina was with him, and when he was away smuggling refugees to Yugoslavia, she was with Vladimir. Vladimir thought that Christina's relationship with Anjay was based on pity for the wounded war hero. That wasn't true at all, though. It was actually the closest. It's like he was her soulmate. Like, they were meant to be, like, that is her, that is her person. They are the same person cut from different cloth. It's amazing. And it was actually the closest connection Christina would have with anyone in her life. And Ange was secure enough in their bond that he accepted her affair with Vladimir.

Stuff can get passionate when you're facing danger together, you know. That's why James Bond is so horny. I assume, right? It's spy stuff. You got to work out those nerves somehow. Yeah. And it's so obvious. Like, if Christina was a man, this would not even, like, this would be a blip in her story.

Right. Like, it's just not even. Yeah. A few months later, Christina and Vladimir were given a mission to smuggle microfilm documents to the resistance in Warsaw. Andrei's wooden leg made the mountain journey impossible for him, so Christine and Vladimir left alone, their backpack stuffed with maps, coded letters, propaganda, fake papers and passes, American dollars, and the microfilm, any of which could get them shot. Christina also wore a quartz necklace that Vladimir had bought her. By now, the Hungarian police were essentially controlled by the Gestapo, and the two of them had to run like hell across the border to Slovakia under gunfire from the border guard. They must have been crappy shots.

Like, just, wow, they had like the stormtrooper bullets from Star Wars. You all suck at this. I mean, the stormtroopers were based on... Yeah, absolutely. ...were based on these officers, so it makes sense. They trekked through the woods. Eventually, exhausted, they headed for a train station in the pouring rain. from which they planned to travel into Poland.

They fell asleep on the platform and were woken up by an armed patrol who started marching them towards the local police station, where they would be held overnight before being transferred to the Gestapo the next day. The guards marched them over an iron bridge that crossed a deep, fast river. In the middle of the bridge, Christina started to limp and crouched down to rub her feet. Vladimir came to her side, saying he was going to get a bandage for her out of his backpack. Instead, he took out a thick envelope containing the most incriminating evidence and tossed it into the river, where it floated for a few seconds before sinking into the deep water. A guard dragged Vladimir off the bridge, yelling that he better tell what was in the package or he'd be shot.

Christina insisted there had only been foreign money and black market magazines of hers in there. Things that were illegal, but not such a big deal. Your story stinks, the guard shouted at her. It's shit. The guards laid out everything remaining from the backpacker. on the grass by the tracks. Food, Vladimir's wallet, forged travel documents that looked real, Christina's lipstick and perfume, and envelopes of cash in different currencies. The money was the most suspicious thing. It also rapidly disappeared into the guards' pockets. But then they found a Madonna pendant that Vladimir wore around his neck. This was a secret badge of his resistance group,

but he could tell by how excited the guards were to find it, that it wasn't a secret anymore. He thought he was about to die and started thinking quickly about how he could get some of the cyanide hidden in his pocket to Christina. But then one of the guards held up Christina's quartz necklace to examine it in the light of their only flashlight. Christina, the smartest human on Earth, this is so cool, Christina yelled, my diamonds! And grabbed for the necklace, breaking the chain and scratching the guard's face. He slapped her face with one hand while trying to grab the falling gemstones with the hand that held the flashlight. Vladimir slapped the flashlight out of his hand, and in the sudden darkness grabbed Christina and pulled her up the embankment beside the train tracks, then they threw

themselves down the slope on the other side as gunfire erupted behind them. The woods were close, and in moments they were dashing through the wet branches, then slipping down a long slope. The guards decided that staying back with the money and jewels, diamonds, was better than chasing through the woods at night. The mission to Poland was a bust, but they'd survived. Absolutely amazing. And two days later, they crossed back into Hungary, reaching Budapest the next evening. They'd left behind Christina's fake travel documents, though, which included her photograph. Her picture was soon displayed in every train station in Poland, with a hefty reward for her capture or execution. A lot of the resistance couriers within Poland were women, and because

they had to frequently travel through checkpoints with fake identities and carrying incriminating evidence, it was among the most dangerous jobs in the entire operation. A courier who survived even a few months of work was incredibly rare. With her portrait everywhere, it would be a death sentence for Christina and to go back to Poland. Instead, she joined in Ange's dangerous work of smuggling escaped Polish and British POWs through Hungary, while smuggling money, guns, and explosives in the other direction. Their work rescued thousands of people. Vladimir was ordered to join with the Polish army in Palestine

and would win medals for courage fighting in North Africa before being wounded and transferred to intelligence work. Christina and Ange worked for months at their dangerous job, which often involved them driving at top speed away from the border under gunfire, with escaped soldiers crammed into their car. Sometimes they also transported secret microfilm from Christina's contacts, which they kept hidden either in her gloves or in a secret compartment in Ange's wooden leg.

I was waiting for it. It's not a real spy caper until someone's prosthetic is used as a smuggling device. How is this real life? And I'm over here feeling accomplished if I can check off my sad little to-do list every day. Look at these people. Good God. But things were becoming increasing. precarious in Budapest as Hungary moved deeper into alignment with Nazi Germany.

Angey knew he was being surveilled and that the Germans were pressing for his arrest. But he and a friend conducted some daring sabotage, swimming out one night to plant explosives on barges used to transport gasoline to Austria. Christina, who couldn't swim, waited in a fast car, holding Ange's wooden leg. The barges exploded spectacularly as they sped away. so movie-like. The Germans suspected Ange's group, and soon some of them were arrested and interrogated. A new recruit was spotted talking to someone from the German embassy. To make sure he'd found the mole, Anjay fed him some false information. His suspicions confirmed he asked a gang

of Hungarian thieves he had good relations with to take care of the informant. They found him in a bar, and acting like friendly drunks got him completely hammered on plum brandy while they drank water. When the informant was drunk enough to pass out, they left him on a bench in a public park on a night when the temperature was well below zero, and he froze to death. And you can't even really say they murdered him, can you? Like, it's kind of, you know, kind of. Yeah. But, I mean, we just got him drunk and just, you know, he could have walked home, right? By the end of January 1941, Christina and Ange were under near constant surveillance, and Christina was sick with a severe cold.

At four o'clock in the morning, banging on their door woke them up. Christina pulled on a robe while Angey fixed his leg on. They knew the military police often conducted raids early in the morning. Angey noticed that Christina seemed almost cheerful, as she often did when faced with danger.

She's got something going on in her brain. Like, this is not normal. You know what I mean? And sometimes it's a psychopathic trait, but she is obviously a highly moral person. Like, I don't think she's a psychopath, but something's going on in that amygdala, you know, where she's not feeling fear like most of us would.

Yeah. As the police came in, Christina went to the bathroom and flushed some incriminating diary pages. Why did you pull the chain? One of the police officers demanded. Isn't it usual to flush the loo after you use it? Christina said, then offered to make them some tea. The police searched the apartment but found nothing.

They'd been anticipating arrest for some time. Angey managed to hide his coated notebook in a jacket pocket before they were driven to a police station to be interrogated separately by the Gestapo. Officers first removed Ange's overcoat, searched it thoroughly, and hung it on the wall. Then they told Andre to strip down to his underwear, when while undressing he managed to slip the notebook into the pocket of the hanging overcoat, which, having already been searched, was ignored throughout the rest of the interrogation. Any amateur magicians out there want to try some sleight of hand where the penalty for failure is getting shot in the head?

No pressure. They beat and interrogated him for 19 hours. Then there was a brief pause as the interrogators ended their shift and were replaced. The brutal questioning continued. In fact, it had gone on long enough that Aja was certain they needed a concrete confession that he and Christina were working against the Nazis before the Hungarians would agree to extradite them. He spent a short, uncomfortable night in a nearby prison before being brought back to the interrogation chamber, where he was surprised to see Christina, her face bruise just like his own. She had been interrogated just like Ange had. When the Gestapo demanded why Ange had spent so much time visiting the British minister in Budapest, she said it probably had to do with the minister's attractive 18-year-old daughter.

That daughter, Kate, was actually helping the underground movement and had a very obvious crush on a lot. Ange. When the interrogators showed Christina the picture of herself that had been posted all throughout Poland, she stared at it curiously for a while before saying, The likeness is striking. However, it seems to me that the girl in the picture is much prettier. We mentioned that Christina had been sick with a bad cold. She played it up, exaggerating her cough till she started weeping.

Then she started biting her tongue hard again and again so it looked like she was coughing up blood. This was terrifying. This was the time before antibiotics, and Christina was mimicking the symptoms of highly advanced and highly contagious tuberculosis. The Gestapo called in a doctor to examine Christina. The doctor almost certainly wasn't fooled, but he was a Hungarian with no connection to the Nazis, and took note when Christina casually and truthfully mentioned that she was distantly related to Admiral Horthy, the current region of Hungary. He took x-rays, which showed clear shadows on Christina's lungs, a holdover for

from the brief time she'd worked above the fiat garages 15 years earlier. The doctor showed these to the Gestapo and urged them to release Christina to avoid contamination. And the same applied to Anjé, who would also certainly be contagious too. So they were released, but they were not free. The police told them they could not leave their apartment without permission. When they were allowed out, they were to take no kind of transport other than the tram, and they were to call the police every three hours. As they walked home, it was clear to both of them that they were being followed.

They started packing as soon as they were inside. When he had first fled Poland, Ange had been driving a sporty two-seater Opel Olympia, which he'd stolen from a German officer. Since then, he'd kept it hidden in a dirty greenhouse in the courtyard behind the apartment. The Hungarian authorities had no record of it. That evening, a friend came over with a bottle of brandy, and Ange asked him for a favor.

Shortly after, the friend drove off in the big Chevrolet that Ange had used for his border adventures, the Hungarian police close behind. Then Ange and Christina zipped off in the other direction in the Opel, quickly arriving at the British minister's official residence. The minister immediately had false British passports created for them, with Ange becoming Andrew Kennedy and Christina becoming Christine Granville. She also took the operative. opportunity to move her birthday forward seven years, going from 33 to 26 with the stroke of a pen.

She would stick with her new birthday and age for the rest of her life. Christina spent the long drive to the Yugoslavian border folded up in the trunk of the minister's Chrysler, which was marked with diplomatic penance and allowed to pass the border unchallenged. Ange got across by saying he had a buyer for the opal waiting for him on the other side of the border, and Pinky promised to come back right after. after. I'm guessing if this didn't work, he was just going to blaze right through, risking being shot at, something he was really familiar with, but the guards let him through, and he just

raced off after the limousine. Yugoslavia was, for the moment, neutral, and Christina and Ange relaxed in a Belgrade hotel, truly safe for the first time in months. But the war was a long way from over, and the same is true for this story, which, as you've probably guessed already, will be continued next week. Our main source for the story, by the way, was the biography The Spy Who Loved by Claire Mully, and it's terrific. But if you don't want spoilers, maybe wait to read it until after Part 2. Now, before we go, don't forget about our two amazing live shows coming up. First, we've got Summer Camp, September 10th through 13th, an awesome four-day festival in Equinoct, Pennsylvania, hosted by Dan and Lindsay Cummins of Time Suck and Scared to Death.

We'll be performing live alongside them and the podcast astonishing legends in addition to a roster of hilarious stand-up comedians and local bands. Go to Badmagic Productions.com for more info and to buy tickets. Then we've got our True Crime Cruise, Crime Wave 2.0, February 8th through 12th, 2027. If you want to come to the Bahamas with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal podcasts in the world, like Case File, Unexplained, Last Podcasts on the Left and True Crime, garage, here's what you got to do. Tickets are on sale, but they are almost sold out. So if you want to go, make sure you get over to crimewave at sea.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP. You'll get $100 off, plus a private meet and greet with us. And the cool thing is you can pay for it all at

once or you can set up a payment plan and pay it off over time. So get on it, Jall. You do not want to miss this cruise. It's so much fun. That's crimewaveatc.com slash campfire. So that was a wild one. Right, campers? You know, we'll have part two for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Rich, Nico, Lance and Rhonda, and Brandy. We appreciate you all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content. And

like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And once you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rad enamel pin, or fridge magnet while supplies last, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. Welcome to Mick Unplugged, the number one podcast for self-improvement and modern leadership. I'm Mick Hunt, your host, and I'm here to challenge your why and fuel, your because.

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the voice and face of modern leadership entrepreneur and self-improvement. Let's get started. World is ending. You just don't know it yet, but you feel it. Deep down, your bones, don't you?

Some call it the great undoing as it seeps in at the edges of forgotten places, where crumbling abandoned ruins slowly fade away, and in their fading, these places wear thin the fabric of reality, their rot creeping outward. It calls to you and to the others. The Edge of the Forgotten is a supernatural horror hybrid podcast, with season one totaling 13 narrated episodes and 10 full-cast audio drama episodes. Now running on the Realm Network and all popular podcast platforms, with new episodes every Tuesday through the end of November. Welcome to The Undoing. Welcome to Edge of the Forgotten.