True Crime Campfire - Resistance: The Life of Spy Krystyna Skarbek Pt 2

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Last week, we introduced you to Krystyna Skarbek, a daring resistance agent who smuggled valuable intelligence and thousands of refugees out of Nazi-occupied Poland. When we left off last week, she and her lover Andrzej had just fled Hungary, one step ahead of the Gestapo, and enjoyed a brief moment of peace in Belgrade. That wasn’t going to last for long. Join us for the finale of this incredible true story. 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: Clare Mulley, The Spy Who Loved 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

The other I'm not Howe Not high the sum up You know I'm You know I'm

This one This is This is Rueue Google to be the same Kawess Rate

To and $40 or more $40 or Appal Appalette and pay

and it's You can't You're Mansocted You're I'm Hello, WISE.com. 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. Last week, we introduced you to Christina Scarbeck, a daring resistance agent who smuggled valuable intelligence and thousands of refugees out of Nazi-occupied Poland. When we left off last week, she and her lover, Ange, had just fled Hungary, one step ahead of the Gestapo, and enjoyed a brief moment of peace in Belgrade.

That wasn't going to last for long. This is part two of Resistance, the life of Christina Scarbeck. Christina and Ange felt safe and welcome in Belgrade, enjoying the city and its cafes in the daytime, with the British minister taking them out to nightclubs and belly dancing bars after dark. but their visas were only good for seven days, and they were keen to move on to Cairo and get back to work. Cairo was the regional headquarters of the Special Operations Executive, the SOE, the sneaky organization established by Churchill to disrupt enemy activity and gather intelligence in occupied countries. The local SOE head met the pair in Belgrade and asked Christina if she could recommend anyone to take over the role in Budapest that she'd just been forced to flee. Christina's suggestion surprised both her boss and Ange, her husband, Yeja.

Since being refused a military position, Yeja had continued his diplomatic work in West Africa, with him and Christina communicating by letters, which on her side were pretty vague and bland, both because of her secret intelligence work and because of her affairs. Yeja had recently given up his diplomatic post and was now in Cairo, ready to start looking for Christina. He was an excellent choice for the role of smuggling secret intelligence over the mountains.

He was multilingual, brave, an excellent skier, and it wasn't a coincidence that he worked in diplomacy. He was both persuasive and charming, valuable qualities and intelligence work. Christina wrote to him, asking him to meet her in Istanbul. On the way, she and Ange stopped in Sofia Bulgaria, where the SOE officially recruited Ange, and Christina handed over the last microfilm she'd received from the musketeers, the Polish resistance group she'd had the closest links to. The microfilm contained pictures of German troops building up on the Russian border, suggesting, correctly, that the Nazis were getting ready to attack. The microfilm provided by Christina gave the British their first real indication of what was going on. It took them a day

to get to the Turkish border, driving through torrential rain and often having to push their Opel Olympia out of particularly muddy spots on the road. Turkey would remain neutral throughout the war, but Bulgaria was moving rapidly onto the German orbit, and when the Bulgarian border guards saw their British passports, they were immediately suspicious. They had Christina and Ange bring everything they had in their car into their little guard hut, where they'd go through it all meticulously, even sifting through the powder in Christina's compact. They had Ange go and take the tires off the opal and bring them to to be examined, which he did without complaint, despite the pouring rain and the increasing pain

in his wounded leg. The guards had a fierce-looking German Shepherd guard dog, which growled and lunged at Ange whenever he came close, making the guards laugh. Christina decided to take a small piece of revenge. She'd grown up with dogs, loved them, and knew how to handle him. She went over to the guard dog, soothed it with some soft words, then put her hand on its head until it looked up her. She sat cross-legged and petted the dog while it fawned all over her. When the guards finally let them cross into Turkey, Christina had Ange's stop when they were just a little way across the border. She got out of the car and whistled, and the guard dog broke away from its handler and ran towards her, nuzzle in her face. She loved on it a minute and then sent it back. She just wanted to show

the guards that she could have stolen their dog if she'd wanted to, which, man, that is a flex and a half. Your dog likes me more than you. That's devastating, man. That cuts you to the quick, right? Good, good revenge. Turkey's neutrality made Istanbul a calm haven in the war, but it also meant it was full of spies and intrigue. They were still in some danger. In March of 1941, Yeja Gizzyzitsky arrived to meet his wife for the first time in a year and a half. He would later claim that he knew immediately what was going on between Christina and Ange. writing, they were lovers and we had to part. He could tell Ange felt deeply uncomfortable about the situation.

I told him not to take it hard, that it was not his fault, but the wars, and that I understood how it all had happened. Now, this was all very generous and not true at all. Yes, it was just retroactively trying to reclaim control of a situation which Christina was actually calling all the shots. Bless his heart. She deliberately concealed the real nature of her relationship with Ange, and convinced Yezja to take up her former role in Budapest, convinced that if he knew their marriage was effectively

over, Yezsche wouldn't take the job. She and Ange spent several days briefing him, then Yehja headed north under a fake British passport. He was successful in Budapest, driven by an intense hatred of the Nazis after he learned they'd executed his sister and her children in what is now Ukraine. But his stay there didn't last long. The Nazis invaded and conquered Yugoslav. in April, the German forces traveling freely through Hungary. Britain broke off relations with Hungary and withdrew its diplomatic staff, including Yehja. As he traveled to Istanbul, he sent a telegram ahead.

Please notify Granville to wait. Christine Granville was Christina's British alter ego, the name on her passport. But the message had been received as, please notify Granville not to wait. And Christina and Ange were long gone. Yezsche was furious, convinced that this was not just a telegram error. He thought the British intelligence had done that on purpose to keep their valuable agent headed towards Cairo. I think he was probably right. He kept working from Istanbul, communicating with his Budapest agents via radio.

To get it to Cairo, Christina and Ange had to travel through Syria and Lebanon, which were then controlled by Vichy France. The government of collaborators established after the German invasion. They got visas through a combination of bribery and Christina flirting with officials in the French consulate and eventually reached Cairo. This was territory controlled by the British, but although they were safe, Christina and Ange were not comfortable because hardly anyone would talk to them. In fact, it quickly became clear that they were both under a cloud of suspicion. This gets a little complicated. The Nazis occupied Western Poland, but the Russians had the East, both halves of the divided country, lived under authoritarian regimes of secret police and swift executions,

and there were some Poles, particularly among the former aristocracy, who saw the communists as the greater threat to Poland's future. This included some elements of the musketeers, who sometimes made deals with the Germans for aid against the Russians. The musketeers were highly effective and backed by Britain, which caused resentment and suspicion among the official Polish intelligence service, the Second Bureau. All of this was baked into a way.

waspsness of intrigue around the Polish government in exile as a whole, which was constantly on the verge of a coup. The second bureau exaggerated the musketeers' German ties to make it seem like they, and by extension Christina, were Nazi agents. Dang. Yeah. The British never bought this, but they were in a tricky situation. France had been overthrown and the U.S. hadn't joined the war yet. Poland, which still had an army in Britain in the Middle East, was their only allies. and it was crucial to keep them on good terms. So to keep the polls happy, Christina and Ange were frozen out. Things soon warmed up when Christina's husband,

Yeja arrived in Cairo, furious about the accusations against his wife and, by extension, himself. His temper didn't improve after Christina finally came clean. She didn't like emotional confrontations and usually just decided to be blunt. She told Yeja that she didn't love him anymore and was going to leave him. He exploded in a brief fury, then stormed, out and they would never speak again. Ouch.

The British authorities offered him more intelligence work, but his response was literally, go fuck yourself. He sailed back to London and shortly after that to Canada, giving up on the war in Europe altogether for a new life as a journalist. He and Christina would be formally divorced in 1946. On June 22nd, the Germans invaded Russia in one of history's most notorious and dumbest acts of treasury. By opening a war on two fronts, Hitler started Germany on a slow road to defeat, and the invasion had a big impact on our story. Christina had given the British the first intelligence about the

upcoming invasion. The invasion preparations were the biggest secret in Germany. No Nazi agent would have told the British about them. She was totally exonerated. And with Russia now at war with Germany, the British had a new and powerful ally. The Poles, who remained stubbornly suspicious of didn't matter so much anymore, and the Brits no longer worried too much about staying on their good side. Still, Christina and Ange were kept in Cairo until the SOE found suitable work for them. Plans for various operations fell apart, not least because Christina and Ange were both very distinctive people and well-known to the Gestapo in Eastern Europe. Sending them into the field there would be an almost certain death sentence, although they'd both

been willing to take the risk, because we are talking about two seriously bad men. Mamma jamas here. So for a year they were in Cairo. Christina enjoyed the cafe culture in the markets and making friends with street cats because of course our girl was a cat lady, but she was still frustrated. She hated not being useful. Anjay had more to do, undergoing paramilitary training, which he excelled at. Everyone in the military that Anjé worked with liked him hugely. He was happy, encouraging, and hardworking, which is much more desirable in an army than the moody, John Rambo types you see in the movies, you know? Like, practically speaking, they'd rather have somebody who's fun to be around. The British locations in Cairo could get pretty wild. There were

lots of male officers and very few women and quite a party scene. Christina wasn't really a part of that. She was mostly solitary and didn't usually enjoy parties. She didn't like music much. She claimed to make an exception for Chopin, but that was probably just familial loyalty as he'd been a relative. She didn't like to dance. When one man asked her onto the floor, she said, saying she'd once been deeply in love with a man who had died in her arms on the dance floor, after which she'd sworn to never dance again. This maybe is the most dramatically Polish excuse I've ever heard to get out of doing something. The truth was she was a terrible dancer, me too, girl. I am just the most uncoordinated bitch on the planet. I get it.

She might have been mostly solitary, but she wasn't lonely. Christina had several casual flings in Cairo, especially when Ange went to Palestine to continue his paramilitary training. Their relationship was still close, but not quite as close as it had once been. Anjé would have been content with only her, but it was obvious that the reverse was not true. Christina would always need to be free and act on her feelings. The year in Cairo brought devastating heartbreak

for both of them. Stefania, Christina's mother, was arrested in Warsaw in January and detained at the notorious Poyak prison. That was the last official record of her existence, as the prison archives were destroyed, along with the prison, toward the end of the war. Stefania probably wasn't transferred to one of the Nazi death camps, as there were no records of that. Most likely, she, along with many other prisoners, was driven out into the woods, shot and buried in a mask. grave. Her older brother had joined the Polish home army to fight the Germans, but had also been arrested. Fake papers and the silence of his comrades hid his Jewish heritage from the Nazis, and he spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. Ange's news was possibly even more awful.

Almost his whole family had gathered at a country house for a wedding. A Nazi official wanted the estate for himself, and so sent the SS to kill everyone there. Just the evil of that is staggering. I mean, I want this, so I'm going to kill an entire family. It's just, wow. We forget sometimes, you know, like when people say Nazi, like, we're talking about deep evil, deep, deep, deep, deep. Ange's mother had opened the door and been shot dead. There were 21 people there, and only to survive, two brothers who'd been quickly hidden in the accident. by their mother. Everyone else, including the 17-year-old bride and the boy's 13-year-old sister,

was shot dead. The Polish resistance authorized the killing of the Nazi official, and he and his family were executed by a firing squad that included the two brothers. They both stayed with the resistance and were later killed in action. At the end of the war, Ange had only two surviving relatives, a sister who hadn't gone to the wedding, and a cousin who had already been in the resistance. 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 runs. 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 canon with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark. behind law and order comes a mystery the whole family can enjoy. Patrick Pickle Bottom Everyday Mysteries. Step into the whimsical world of Patrick Picklebottom, a precocious 11-year-old with a love for reading and an uncanny ability to solve mysteries. Inspired by the beloved children's book of the same name, this podcast vividly brings Patrick's tales of deduction and everyday adventures to life as he unravels baffling enigmas and solves clever cases. Patrick

Bottom Everyday Mysteries is perfect for kids and is just as entertaining for grownups who love a good mystery. The whole family can listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Ange was an amazingly resilient person, but this was too much even for him. He transferred to Haifa for parachute training, determined to take a more active role in the war. A doctor gave him permission to take the course despite his wooden leg, and he excelled at the training, the first step of which was practicing rolling out of the back of a truck going 40 miles per hour. Whoa. Still, SOE refused to drop him in the field due to his wooden leg, which made him furious,

but he was assigned to Italy as a parachute liaison officer. First, though, he had to make a trip to London to get expert medical care for his leg and to get a new prosthetic fitted. I wonder if that would still be the case. Like, if anybody's in the military, let me know. Like, if you have a prosthetic limb, does that exclude you from combat? rolls or no, I'm curious if it's changed. I think it does. Yeah, because we have excellent prosthetics now. I mean, you know, I just, I wonder. Yeah. Last week, we briefly mentioned that the

British minister in Budapest had an 18-year-old daughter, Kate, who had both helped the underground movement and had a very obvious crush on Ange. She was now 21 and back in London, and for the few weeks he was in London, she and Ange, who was, had an affair. Although he sent Kate love letters after he went to Italy, they quickly got shorter and shorter and less and less frequent. Kate was also a close friend of Christina's, and they communicated by letter a lot. But when she found out about the affair, Christina apparently saw something of herself in Kate's actions. It didn't damage their friendship much, but Christina was hurt by what she saw as Ange's betrayal, which, come on, girl, seems a little unfair. I mean, she's not exactly a wallflower

herself, but whatever. We hate in others what we loathe in ourselves, et cetera, et cetera. And just to make this even more of a soap opera, one of the guys Christina had dated in Cairo included Kate's older brother Patrick. That didn't go anywhere because she met Patrick shortly before he got married and I wish we knew more about his fiancé because she was apparently one of the very few people who was able to intimidate Christina. She didn't try to be scary or anything, but according to Christina, she was just so poised and elegant that Christina found herself forgetting how to speak English around her. This woman was not afraid of Nazis with guns, okay? So damn right, I wish we knew more about

this fiancee. She must have been something else. And this is strictly speculation, but perhaps it was a crush? I don't know. I also forget how to speak English around pretty women. So I'm just saying. Yeah, that's true, man. That is, that's an interesting theory. By 1943, the SOE were employing women agents as couriers and radio operators in occupied territories, both incredibly dangerous positions. As the Allied invasion of France approached, that country became a focus of the SOE, and Christina's experience and fluency in the language made her a perfect fit. SOUE had a nine-month basic training course covering sabotage, arson, ambush, and succinct instructions on how to deal with informants.

Quote, they must be killed. Again, these were women. Okay, so those twats who say stuff like, oh, women shouldn't be in combat, or women didn't do any really dangerous jobs in World War II. These badass ladies would like a word, okay? The course included weeks of paramilitary training in the Scottish Highlands,

where recruits learned to live off the land and were taught how to use firearms and explosives and how to kill someone silently. After that was parachute training and then a course on recruitment and subversion. Already having plenty of field experience, Christina's bosses in Cairo wanted to speed run her through the course right there in just a couple of months. I really hope there were like drill sergeants with thick Scottish accents. Nothing can motivate you like an angry Scott yelling at you now. I wish I could do the accent.

I would, I can't. My husband laughs at me so hard. I am bad at it. She was intended to work as a courier in France, moving messages and material among the various resistance groups, a role most often filled by women because able-bodied men were forced to work in German labor camps. It was a job requiring someone who could keep a cool head when confronted and questioned, who had excellent organizational skills, and who had the ability to persuade resistance members

to follow their often dangerous instructions. Christina had all of these, but she wasn't as comfortable. with all the other skills the SOE had tried to drill into her. Having grown up on a country estate where hunting was common, she'd been her own guns all her life, but she never liked using them. They were loud and they kicked in her hand. Her instructors could never get her to overcome her instinctive reaction of closing her eyes whenever she pulled the trigger.

She would be dropped into France with a pistol, but decided she'd only ever use it as a weapon of last resort. It wasn't that she had any real aversion to violence during wartime, though. she just like knives better. She kept an S-O-E dagger with a seven-inch blade strapped to her thigh, which might be the most metal-ass thing I've ever heard my life. I just love this woman. Her immediate superior at S-O-E thought Christina's greatest weapon was what he called her considerable powers of persuasion, which he said combined feminine charm with a controlled indignation, which it was easy to believe might suddenly erupt into fury. She also had an ability to persuade any man,

on whom she was working, that he was unusual in being perceptive enough, not only to understand the arguments she was advancing, but to agree with them. That's a damn good talent. Every bit as useful as good marksmanship in a situation like this. Yeah, making someone feel very intelligent is a really amazing way to get them to like you. Unfortunately, today, most men that use it just come off as condescending. Like, oh, you're not like other girls. You actually understand sports. I got that a lot in my single days. You're not like the other girls. Mm-hmm. Okay. Great. In France, she was intended to join up with Francis Camar.

Francis had a Belgian father, but had been born in London in 1916 and grew up to be a tall, thin, thoughtful young man who spoke fluent French. When he was 16, he decided to become both a pacifist and a socialist. When the war started, he was a history teacher and registered as a conscientious. objector to avoid the draft. Now this wasn't a simple thing. He had to convince a tribunal that his moral objections were serious rather than being based on a desire to avoid the danger, or he would face jail time. He convinced the tribunal of his sincerity, but lost his job and took up farm work. In 1941, his brother, a pilot in the Royal Air Force, was killed in action, and in his grief, Francis started to have doubts about his pacifism. When his daughter was born in the

the start of 1942, he was terrified at the prospect of her growing up under Nazi rule and decided he needed to get involved with the war effort. He still had little interest in the military, though, writing, I might be ordered to kill people in a way that was entirely wrong. Once you'd accepted the notion of the discipline of an armed force, you were bound to accept the probability of stupid and ridiculous orders which you'd have to obey. Last week, we mentioned that British intelligence was, and probably still is, full of chaps who knew each other from posh schools, and that included Francis. He asked a friend for an introduction and was interviewed and recruited by SOE. In March 1943, he was delivered to France.

The British had a small military plane that could land and take off from just a couple hundred yards of flat ground, such as fields in the French countryside. The plane that dropped Francis off picked up another agent who was returning to London and who gave Francis some quick good advice before he left. Always carry a newspaper, as it was almost impossible to get toilet paper in France right now. That's given me flashbacks to COVID. A team drove him to Paris to meet his first connection. But the next morning, his connection didn't show up for a cafe meeting. Francis got spooked, picked up his suitcase, and walked to the train station.

He was right to be spooked. His connection had been arrested, and before he'd been in the country 24 hours, the Gestapo were already hunting for Francis. He wasn't comforted when he arrived in the beautiful alpine village of San Giorio, where he met a lot of very nice, very brave young men dressed like young resistance people. The point, of course, is to not look like resistance people. He said their headquarters might as well have had a sign on it reading Resistance Clubhouse. Not long after he arrived, there was a letter purportedly from his arrested Paris connection, asking the resistance groups to arrange to fly a defecting German colonel to London. This is ridiculous to Francis. Standard SOE procedure was that if someone from the enemy tried to involve you in a plan, you kill him immediately.

But he couldn't convince the rest of the resistance group of the danger and left to go further south and build up his own organization, because these people were apparently not that bright, bless their hearts. Sure enough, the German colonel was actually a dedicated spy hunter, and the resistance group was destroyed. Many of its members killed. Francis's new resistance circuit was codenamed jockey and was one of the most successful operations in France, sabotaging a hydroelectric power station so that factories couldn't make aluminum for the Luftwaffe, blowing up trains, railway lines, and telegram lines.

They also received secret airdrops of supplies, weapons, and ammunition to be distributed among resistance groups. In September, his courier, Cecily Lefour, was arrested. She didn't break under interrogation, but was sent to the notorious Ravensbrook concentration camp built to imprison women, mainly political prisoners. The women sent there were worked until they couldn't work anymore, and then they would be executed. Many died from starvation, or the Nazi's medical experiments. Shortly after she arrived, Cessaly underwent a successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor, but this was presumably just an opportunity for the Nazi doctors to practice. After the surgery, she was designated as having no value as a laborer, and they killed her in a gas chamber.

This was the position Christina was being sent to fill. On June 6, 1944, D-Day, the Allied invasion of northern France began, and all across the country, the resistance intensified their efforts even further. Nazi reprisals became even more brutal. The Allies dropped more and more arms in ammunition, and Francis was in desperate need of a new courier to help coordinate its distribution. In the back of her plane, along with three other SOE agents, Christina wore a helmet and had a revolver and commando knife hidden in the plain French clothes worn under her flight suit.

There was a rubber-coated cyanide pill sewn into the hem of her skirt. She said she could kill herself as she got captured. Damn, man. They were flying at night and solo, just a couple hundred. yards above the ground that there wouldn't be time for their parachutes to open unaided. A line attached to the plane would pull the canopy open as soon as Christina jumped. It was all very dangerous, especially as the exit hatch opened, and it was clear there were gale force winds blowing across the field they were supposed to land in and be greeted by the

resistance. Between the winds and engines, it was too loud to speak. Christina, exhilarated by danger, as always, laughed just before she jumped and tapped out a message in Morse code that S-O-E files just recorded as being, quote, excessively rude. Then she jumped and was immediately buffeted by the winds and blown four miles off course. She landed hard in a wheat field, smashing her revolver and badly bruising her coxics and ankle. She buried her ruined gun along with her parachute and flight gear and waited for dawn. When it was bright enough, she strolled out of the woods in her plain French clothes, masking the pain in her ankle and looking like she'd lived there.

her whole life. She met Frances a few days later, and they hit it off immediately, both dedicated people who nonetheless were able to be lighthearted, even in dark times. Christina's laughter was soon a familiar sound. She was more experienced than anyone else there, and very quickly became Francis's second command. She was immediately involved with distributing weapons all across the region, organizing raids and sabotage and encouraging everyone to keep fighting. Her French was perfect, but did have an accent. Most people thought she was Irish. She'd only been in France for a week when she took part in a defiant Bastille Day celebration in the small town of D. Early in the morning, everyone looked up at the sound of engines.

72 silver American B-17 bombers flew low overhead and dropped supply canisters onto the wooded plateau of the Verkhor for the Marquis. While most of the resistance worked in secret under the disguise of ordinary citizens, the maquis were an army, hundreds of rebels living off the land in the mountains. The parachutes carrying the canisters were colored red, white, and blue. Everyone in the crowd cheered. But the drop was hardly discreet. Half an hour later, a German recon plane arrived, spraying the landing zone with machine gun fire. Everyone ran for cover, except Christina, who just shielded her eyes from the sun and looked curiously up at the plane. More fighters soon arrived, and then bombers.

As was typical for the Nazis, they targeted civilians in the towns nearby with incendiary bombs, leveling entire villages and killing hundreds. Christina and others worked quickly under fire, cutting away parachutes from the supply canisters and unpacking the weapons, ammunition, and explosives inside. German infantry forces were quickly closing in. That night, it seemed like the world was on fire. Christina and Francis were both exhausted and both convinced they were likely to die the next day under further bombing. They found a room in a smoldering hotel and went to bed together for the first time, and I got it to that is woo.

Like, that's romantic, I got to say, you know, smoldering hotel, like you're going to die any minute and you just woof. Early the next morning, they looked out the window and saw a German bomber flying straight toward them. Francis said quietly, If they release a bomb now, it will come right in through the window next to us. Right as he said, now, a bomb dropped.

But Francis had been wrong, although not by much. They heard the bomb scrape across the roof tiles, and then it embedded itself in the bank of earth behind the hotel, but it didn't explode.

The Maquis fought fiercely as the Germans attacked. They were initially successful, but when experienced SS commandos with superior, weapons arrived, defeat was inevitable. The battle was valuable to the war effort as a whole, with the Germans forced to deploy thousands of men to the Verkhor instead of against the Allies in Normandy, but it was horrific. Hundreds of the Maquis were killed in action, and those that were

captured were burned alive or hanged with piano wire. My God, why do we do this? Why do we do this to each other? The war sucks. The Germans treated the local civilian. the same way, slaughtering them no matter how young or how old they were. There are vampires out there. They're beside you in the darkness, but what people don't understand is that they're not monsters. They're just going to work, living there on lives. But we are a dying breed. Those who came before me, they are fearful and are not content to sit back and just disappear. And they'll do anything to fix that. From the creators of Parkdale Haunt comes Woodbine, a podcast about monsters, dreams, and changes. Those you want,

and those you never saw coming. Season 2 arrives September 24th, distributed by Realm. Hey, I'm Ashley, host of Crime Salad, and every week my husband Ricky joins me as my partner in crime. We know the true crime space is crowded, so we skip the loud, bubbly small talk and get straight to the facts of the most gripping cases. If you want to see what we're all about,

check out our recent two-parter deep dive. She saved him, can you save her? Covering the baffling Rebecca Zahow case. If you want a true crime, crime podcast that feels authentic and respects the details, come check us out. Search crime salad wherever you get your podcast. The battle lasted four days and close to the end, the resistance forces were ordered to disperse. Christina, Francis, and others snuck out past German patrols, then walked 60 miles and 24 hours to relative safety and took some brief time to recover,

but only a brief time, as they both still had plenty of work to do. One of the missions Christina had been given was to try and subvert Polish forces in the area. By this stage of the war, the Germans were desperate and had forcibly conscripted units of young Polish men, keeping them in line with threats to their families back home. These were obviously not enthusiastic soldiers, and SOE thought they could be encouraged to switch sides. The Allies would land in southern France in August, and Francis and Christina moved into the Alps to try and disrupt any chance of the Germans sending reinforcements from Italy through the mountain passes. One of those passes was controlled from a fort at Kolda Larche that was mainly garrisoned by conscripted poles.

The local resistance cell refused to help Christina. There was no shortage of important missions at the time, but she recruited a local gendarme as a guide, and they spent two days hiking and climbing through the woods into the mountains. Christina had ditched her modest French peasant disguise for boots and uniform. pants and had a megaphone over her shoulder. Once they reached the fortress, she snuck close and covertly spoke with one of the Polish guards, learning the time and location of roll call every morning.

Two days later, the order came through for the resistance to start closing down the alpine passes, and Christina went back to the fort, calling up through the megaphone. She told the polls her real name, making it certain she would be killed if captured. With patriotic language and probably the promise of good Americans, American rations, she persuaded them when the time was right to sabotage the heavy guns in the fort and desert, taking as many weapons with them as they could. The time was right a few days later when other British agents arrived to try and convince the German commander to surrender. With half his garrison turning on him, he had no choice. With no shots fired using only words,

Christina had taken control of an incredibly valuable mountain pass. The maquis used German explosives to blow up the roads so that German vehicles and armor couldn't reinforce against the American forces that were about to land in the south. Christina's joy at her success didn't last long, though. The same day the garrison surrendered, she learned that Francis had been arrested by the Gestapo. Francis had recently met some new SOE agents, among them an army officer named Jean Fielding. He had organized resistance on Crete and had been sent to France as an experienced hand, but it was quickly clear to him that Francis had everything running about as well as possible,

and there was not actually much for Fielding to do. Francis offered him a tour of the resistance circuit so that Fielding might be able to take over if anything happened to Francis. With them, Christian Sorensen, a French officer who had trained with SOE. Fielding had landed with a ton of cash, and he was suddenly aware that it would look suspicious if they were stopped. They shared the money between them and met up with their driver, Claude Renoir. who, as it happened, was the grandson of the great impressionist painter.

Oh, wow. Yeah, if you, honestly, like, I think if you were in Europe at some point, you were related to some great artist or musician or something. I think that's the lesson that this episode is giving us, right? As they drove out of the town of Dynia, they saw a roadblock ahead with armed soldiers who had already spotted them. Francis and the others weren't particularly worried because these were soldiers from the Eastern legions against communism, mainly Armenian and Georgian troops recruited from among Soviet POWs as the Germans got increasingly desperate. They hadn't been eager to fight for the Soviet Union and weren't keen on fighting for Nazi Germany either.

They waived Francis's group through after the most cursory inspection, but Renoir had barely got the car started when another vehicle pulled up, and Francis muttered Gestapo. The man in charge was Max Vom, who fielding later described as, quote, a perfect young Nazi Blue eyes, fair hair, fresh skin, breeches, and jackboots, not a single essential feature was missing from this typical example of Stormtrooper. Ech, gross. Hmm. He was a Nazi, but not German, a Belgian collaborator who acted as a translator for the Germans.

He was also a notorious torture, and one of the men the resistance hated most of all. Francis and his companions claimed to be hitchhikers who didn't know each other and had been picked up separately by Renoir. This was believable. Gas was so rare in France that many cars had been converted to run on steam with wood-burning boilers, and drivers would generally stop to help out someone on foot. But Vam noticed that the money of the three men were carrying was numbered sequentially. They were obviously lying and were arrested.

Renoir was free to go. In Dina prison, they were thrown into a filthy basement cell with a metal bucket for a toilet. There were four bunks in there and another prisoner whose French had such an obvious German accent that Francis felt quite insulted at the clumsy attempt to get the truth out of them. Their interrogations were equally clumsy, with plenty of punches to the face and kidneys. Not pleasant, but it was nothing that was going to make trained SOE agents talk. But the Nazis didn't need them to talk. When they got back to their cell, they were informed that they had all confessed to smuggling

contraband and were condemned to death. The Nazis had no idea they had imprisoned the most important. important resistance leader in the region. They just knew they had three suspicious men and decided to kill him for no other reason than that. Christina hurried back from the Alps and immediately tried to arrange a raid to free the prisoners. The Maquis reluctantly refused, calculating that too many lives would be lost, most likely including the prisoners. So she tried another way. She walked straight into the Gestapo offices to meet a gendarme named Albert Schenck. Shank was someone who tried too hard to be clever, a liaison officer for the Gestapo who also sometimes worked as a double agent for the resistance, trying to keep a foot in both camps.

Christina identified herself as Frances's wife, and also added another lie, telling Shank that she was the niece of the British Field Marshal Montgomery. Because of that, she knew that the Allies would land on the coast very shortly, and Shank would be, as she put it, handed over to the mob. She was right about the schedule. The invasion would begin the next day. Everyone was expecting it, and it was clear the Germans were losing the war. Shank was scared, but had to try and squeeze something out of the situation. He demanded a bribe of two million francs to set up a meeting for Christina with Max Vum, who was the only person who could get the prisoners out. Christina agreed, and the SOE managed to deliver the money to her in less than 48 hours.

By the time she had the money, everyone knew the Americans had landed, and Christina had fun, scaring Shank by exaggerating how close they were and what the populace would do to him once the Germans had been run out of town. She only handed the money over when she was sure Shank was too scared to try anything shifty. Shek arranged a meeting with Vom that afternoon at Vom's apartment. Christina arrived first, led in by Vom's wife. When the Belgian came in, he had his... his gun drawn and pointed at Christina, but he soon put it on the table between them. Christina told him she was a British officer in regular communication with Supreme Allied Command and showed him some valuable radio crystals as proof. She laid things out for him.

Every line of retreat from Dina was blocked by the resistance, so when the Americans arrived, the garrison would have to surrender. The German soldiers would become POWs, but collaborators, like Vom, would be handed over to the maquis. who, she said, had a particular way of dealing with those found guilty of treachery. She exaggerated her own importance, but everything else she said was true, and Vam knew it. When his wife brought coffee, his hands were shaking so bad he couldn't pour it without spilling. Christina told him that if he arranged for Francis and his fellow prisoners to be released, she'd guarantee him safe conduct to the Allied base outside of France.

She worked on him for three hours until Vom abruptly said he'd set them free. By this time it was 7 p.m. and the execution of the prisoners was scheduled just two hours later. Just before nine, Francis, Fielding, and Sorensen were walked across the prison courtyard by Vom. They were all convinced they were about to be shot. Instead, Vom bundled them into a citron driven by Schenck and they drove out of Dina. They soon picked up Christina and not long after

After that, they ditched the car, helping Vom bury his uniform jacket. Unexpectedly and delightedly, they were free. Christina had an iron-hard sense of honor and tried to ensure her promise to Vom was kept, but the Allies were not willing to help someone who had aided in such atrocities as he had. Christina was furious that her word had been broken, but Max Fom quickly disappeared, most likely killed by the Maki. Aw. I understand Christina wanting her word kept. but like nothing of value was lost.

Yeah, and I think that had nothing to do with wanting to spare this piece of shit. It was because she wanted to keep a reputation as somebody. If she says that she can get you this or that, then she can get you this or that. Because she might have to do this again, you know. The Americans moved into Dina two days later, greeted joyfully by the locals. Francis warned Shank not to go home, but he did anyway and was quickly murdered. Oh. The SOE file on the rescue was popular with agents back in London.

One officer wrote on the cover, Good reading. I'm going to make sure I keep on Christine's good side in the future. Someone else had written below, So am I. She frightens me to death. Hell yeah. With Allied forces invading from the north and south,

France was soon free of German control, and the SOE agents were recalled to Britain. For most of them, this meant coming home. Francis and Christina had many things in common, but he had a strict code of honesty that she did not. He told his wife, Nan, about his affair with Christina in France, and even asked if Nan would be cool with him continuing the affair. Nan said, no, no, she would not be cool with him doing that. She also admitted to an affair of her own with France's commanding officer who had subsequently been killed in action. If you're ever watching a war movie or documentary, just assume that everybody is banging everybody.

Literally, if they're not getting shot at, they're just banging like rabbits. Good old life-affirming sex, I guess. Also, I was thinking, this is like, the S-O-E was just like the world's most terrifying polychule. Like everyone was having sex and they were all killing Nazis. They're terrifying. Francis and Christina would stay friends, but he concentrated on rebuilding his marriage. Christina had not come home. The war was still brutally active in Poland, the Polish underground staged an uprising in Warsaw that was met with fierce German reprisals as they followed Hitler's instructions to destroy the entire city and kill everyone there. The Nazis rampaged through their city, slaughtering everyone

they could find. The Soviet Red Army, theoretically Poland's ally, had swept across the country pushing the Germans back. When they'd been greeted by resistance groups, the Russians had killed most of them. Stalin had his own plans for Poland and experienced paramilitary groups would get in his way. When the Red Army reached Warsaw, it just stopped and waited as the terrible struggle destroyed the city. Fewer Germans and fewer Polish patriots would make things easier for them in the future. The Russians waited until the Germans had essentially destroyed and abandoned the whole city, then occupied it and moved on towards Germany. After Hitler killed himself, the remaining German forces soon surrendered, and the war in Europe was essentially over. The Soviets claimed the eastern

parts of Poland and installed a theoretically independent communist government in the remainder. Christina couldn't go home. As both an aristocrat and a British agent, she would certainly have been either transported to Siberia or just quietly disappeared. She soon learned that her older brother, Ange, who had survived the war in a German POW camp, had been arrested by the Russians, then released only to die of tuberculosis soon after. For millions of people, the end of the war brought relief in a sense of closure, but not for Christina. She didn't know what to do with herself, and she was practically broke.

She wasn't alone in that. The sudden demobilization thrust millions of people out of a dangerous, regimented existence and back into everyday life, many of them suffering from what we would now recognize as PTSD. And in Britain, they went back to a weak economy and austerity, with continuing rationing of food, clothes, and fuel. The SOE was dissolved shortly after the war, with most agents unceremoniously ditched into unemployment, including Christina,

who was considered a headache by the stuffed shirts at the top. Unbelievable. Her wartime actions were recognized with a slew of medals, which mainly made her angry. Women were forbidden from receiving military honors, so all her medals were the kind they gave to civilians. Just unbe-fucking-leavable. Mm-mm.

She reconnected with Ange, who settled in Germany and started a business dealing in sports cars, but she was still restless and moved down to stay with one of her old Cairo boyfriends in Nairobi. She tried to convince Ange to join her, but he had no interest in what he called, Boiling My Brains in the Sun. Christina came back to London and worked briefly as a waitress and a saleswoman in Herod's before connecting with a distant cousin, Honka, who worked as a steward on ocean liners. It seemed like something that could get Christina out of her rut, and in May of 1951, she traveled to Glasgow for her first job, a long cruise on the luxury ocean liner Urahini. Leaning on the rail as she arrived was another steward, Dennis George Muldowney, something of a ladiesman who saw Christina struggling with her luggage and hurried down to help.

He would be the only friend Christina made among the staff on a miserable voyage. The company had a policy that stewards should wear any wartime medals or awards on their uniforms, which in Christina's case made her look like a three-star general. This made her popular with the passengers and resented by the other staff, many of whom just thought she was a liar. Part of this was due to her heavily accented English. There was a lot of xenophobia in post-war Britain, often aimed at the large number of polls, who, like Christina, had been essentially left stranded in the country.

There were lots of jibes about foreigners that made Christina lose her temper and storm out. Moldowny stood up for her and helped her learn to be a good steward, which she was. In last week's episode, we mentioned that some of those close to Christina made an effort to, as they thought of it, protect her reputation, which included insisting that she and Moldowny only ever had a platonic relationship. That doesn't seem likely. She was lonely, as her frequent letters to Anjay stated, and Moldowny was soon her constant, and only companion. The full force of Christina's attention

was powerful stuff, and only made more so by her evident loneliness and vulnerability. By the time the ship returned to Plymouth in September, Muldowny had gone from attraction to infatuation, through something that felt to him, I guess, like love, and finally

to obsession. It's hard to imagine a worse fit with Christina's casual approach to relationships, but for the moment she didn't recognize what was brewing inside him and was just grateful for his companionship on the long voyage. She invited Muldanay to join her as Ange drove her back to London, and back there she introduced him to her circle of friends. Like her, these were mostly highly accomplished people currently

down on their luck, and although Moldownie was polite and friendly, it was apparent he was deeply uncomfortable. Ange thought all he wanted to do was curl up on a mat on the threshold of Christine's bedroom. we. Ange was in London for a while, and unsurprisingly, Christina enjoyed his company a lot more than that of Muldowny. This was also clear to Moldowny, who started getting jealous and clingy,

which was the absolute quickest way to get Christina to lose interest in someone. In November, she and her cousin Honko worked on a ship heading to Australia, a happier journey than her first one. In January, Moldowny was waiting at the docks for her in Southampton when she got back, which Christina neither expected nor wanted. The three of them took the train together to London, where Christina, with her usual blunt way of approaching uncomfy conversations, told him to leave her alone.

He apologized, but he didn't leave her alone. He started stalking her, pacing in the streets outside her friend's houses when she visited or outside the Shelbourne Hotel. She started to get scared of him. Ange was worried how Maldownie would react to a stern confrontation, considering him to be mentally unbalanced. He urged Christina to break things off gently,

so the three of them went out to the cinema together, but this was a mistake. Christina had a habitual lie she used when her lovers started asking about her close relationship with Ange. She said the injury which had cost him his leg had also made him completely impotent. She had told this lie to Moldownie, but seeing the way they acted together,

he doubted it was true and started burning with resentment. Still, he sailed the next day, and shortly afterward Christina and her cousin headed for Australia again. She came back in April, and Maldowny barged into the lobby of her hotel, loudly berating her for not writing to him and for avoiding him. And again, this is months later, like we're going on whole voyages and coming back and he's still just at a 10, you know, 10 out of 10 obsessed. Christina told him she didn't want to ever see him again and told the hotel porters not to let him in. She and Ange went to Switzerland for a week. While they were gone,

Muldownie quit his steward job and started as Porter at the Reform Club just so he could be closer to where Christina lived. She sailed for South Africa in April, but had decided there would only be one more cruise after that. Ange had made her what he called an open proposal some time ago, and she was coming around to the idea of accepting it.

Her passport showed her as younger, but she was 44 years old and maybe, finally ready to settle down with the one constant presence in her life. Like I said last episode, he was her twin flame. Back in London, Christina had been scheduled to fly to Belgium to meet Ange on June 15th, but the flight was canceled due to engine failure and she'd have to wait until the following day. She went out for dinner with friends and walked home, arriving at the Shelbourne just after 10.

Maldownie was waiting for her, skulking across the street. He followed her into the hotel. and saw her climbing the stairs. He yelled at her, demanding she returned the many letters he'd sent her. Christina came down and calmly told him that she couldn't because she'd burned them and yet again told him she didn't want anything more to do with him. Muldowny lunged and pinned her against the wall. Christina yelled,

Get him off me! Muldownie had a knife hidden in the sheath inside the back of his trousers. He pulled it out and stabbed the five-and-a-half-inch blade into Christina's chest before she even had time to see he had a weapon. It cut straight through her heart, and she was dead in seconds. Oh, my God. A hotel porter ran in and pulled Muldaouni off Christina, slamming him down onto the floor. Christina's body slumped down.

The police were there in minutes. I killed her, Mildownie told them. Let's get away from here and get it over quickly. They did. Get it over quickly. Moldownie confessed without offering any kind of mitigation and was executed by hanging at Pentonville prison three months later. Hundreds of people attended Christina's funeral in London.

She was already famous in espionage in intelligence circles, and as the general public learned about her, some stories seemed to just appear out of thin air. The most persistent is that after the war, she had an affair with James Bond creator Ian Fleming. Fleming worked in intelligence during the war, and he and Christina certainly knew a lot of the same people. Fleming's biographer described the writer's ideal woman

as 30-ish, Jewish, a companion who wouldn't need education in the arts of love. And there are certainly similarities between Christina and Vest Berlin, the double agent in the first bond story, Casino Royale. But the connection seems to have been mostly invented by another of Fleming's biographers. Fleming himself wrote about Christina later, but never claimed to have met her. Our main source for the story was Claire Mulley's biography, The Spy Who Loved, which is terrific and includes a ton more detail if you're curious. The story is obviously incredible, cinematic even, better than any James Bond movie if you ask me,

but what kills me about it is that this absolute warrior of a woman ended up murdered the way so, so many women have been both before and after her, that after all she'd been through, all she'd accomplished, in the end, she was still brought down by a jealous man who was pissed that she didn't want him. There's something there about the female existence, but I'm honestly too pissed off right now to find the words for it. All I'll say is rest in power, Christina. You are a true hero, and you deserved so much better. Now, before we go, don't forget about our true crime crews coming up. Crime Wave 2.0, February 8 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 podcast on the left sinisterhood and true crime garage here's what you got to do tickets are on sale now but they're over 90% sold out so if you want to go make sure you get over to crime wave at sea dot com slash campfire and book your cabin asap you'll get a hundred dollars off plus a private meet and greet with us and the great thing is you can pay all at once or you can set up a payment plan and just pay it off over time so get on it jall that's crimewave at c dot com slash campfire So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one 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 Lily, Cassandra, Laura, and Teresa. We appreciate y'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, 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. Now before you go hunting for something else to listen to, let me make it easy. I'm Mike Carruthers, host of a podcast called Something You Should Know. and I speak with experts about fascinating things that affect your life from human behavior, relationships, health, science, and everyday mysteries. We've been downloaded millions of times because every episode teaches you something you'll be

talking about later. Open up something you should know and give it one episode. You might just find your new favorite podcast. Hi listeners, we want to tell you about a podcast we love. It's called Rebel Girls, formerly known as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. It's about real-life women who are changing the world with their courage, creativity, and big, bold ideas. Want to know how Taylor Swift became a superstar? Or hear how Simone Biles became the greatest athlete of all time?

From immersive stories to heartfelt interviews, to super smart advice. Rebel Girls brings you stories that will get you fired up to become your best self. There are over 400 episodes for you to explore with new episodes every week. So check it out. Listen to Rebel Girls wherever you get your podcasts. And find us on YouTube.com slash Rebel Girls. And whatever you do, stay Rebel.