Violette Szabo, 1940–45
It was a strange, sad little ceremony. On May 2, 1950, Tania Szabo, a seven-year-old girl, neatly dressed in her best frock and with a fetching bow in her hair, stood before the ambassador at the French Embassy in London. He crouched down low to kiss her cheek and pinned a medal on her frock – the Croix de Guerre – awarded for bravery. Tania was familiar with such ceremonies. She had already met the king, George VI, who had given her a similar award – the George Cross. The medals weren’t for Tania, of course. They were for her mother, Violette. As the ambassador knelt down, he noticed how strikingly like her mother Tania was. The little girl, once described as looking like “the prettiest doll in the shop”, had huge eyes and thick dark hair.
Violette, and Tania’s father Etienne, had both died in the war. He had been killed in North Africa shortly after she was born, and had never met her. Violette had died in Germany when Tania was two and a half. Violette, the actual, real Violette, who had cuddled and comforted her, was a fading memory to Tania now. Only fragments and random recollections – the sound of her voice, the dark scent of her perfume – were left. Now Tania remembered her mother mostly from photographs, and her grandparents’ stories. And what they told her was that her mother was a hero…
Violette Szabo was a British agent, sent to occupied France to fight against the Nazis. She worked for the SOE (Special Operations Executive), a secret service branch of the armed forces. One of Violette’s contemporaries, Odette Sanson, once described her as “the bravest of us all”. She was a fine example of how the circumstances and fortunes of war can transform ordinary people into extraordinary heroes.
But perhaps Violette Szabo, a teenager working behind a perfume counter in a Brixton department store when war broke out, was never that ordinary. Many of the SOE agents were women who stood out in a crowd. Virginia Hall, was a towering, formidable American who had a wooden leg. Christina Granville was a willowy Pole with the face and figure of a catwalk supermodel. They were hardly the sort of people you wouldn’t notice, and neither was Violette. Small – petite – and full of high spirits, one of her senior officers described her wistfully: “She was really beautiful, dark-haired and olive-skinned, with a kind of porcelain clarity…”
She was born Violette Bushell in 1921, to a French mother and English father. Her father set up his own taxi business in Britain and France, and Violette divided her life between both countries. Although the family home was in London, she grew up fluent in both languages, and comfortable with both cultures. Her father, who had met her mother in France during the First World War, was an excellent shot. He regularly horrified his family and friends by shooting apples off Violette’s head. As the eldest daughter, Violette took to responsibility easily enough, helping her mother look after her three younger brothers and making herself useful around the house. Seeming much older than her actual age, she once took off to France after a family argument without even telling her parents. She seemed to have inherited her father’s talent for shooting too – so much so that local fairgrounds banned her from their shooting galleries because she won too many prizes.
Bright and capable she may have been, but she was not especially academic. She left school at 14 to work as a hairdresser’s assistant and then as a shop girl at Woolworths. When war broke out in 1939, Violette gave no thought to joining the armed services. But when France fell to the Nazis in 1940, London was flooded with French soldiers. Violette’s mother thought it would be nice to invite one of them home, “to give them a proper French meal” – especially on Bastille Day, July 14, a French national day of celebration. Violette was sent off to a military parade to find a Frenchman to invite. She duly returned with a handsome Foreign Legion officer named Etienne Szabo, whose bravery had already won him several medals. The Bushell family liked Etienne immensely, and within six weeks he and Violette had married.
Barely days after the ceremony, Etienne left England to fight in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). Violette too decided to “do her bit” – as people said in those days. She joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) – a branch of the army where women could do everything male soldiers were expected to do, except front line combat. Violette was assigned to an anti-aircraft battery, where she was well-liked and did whatever she was asked with great enthusiasm.
Etienne returned for a fleeting visit over a year later, in October 1941. During this time, Violette became pregnant, and had to leave the ATS. Tania was born in June 1942. Etienne heard about the safe arrival of his daughter while fighting the German army in North Africa. But, during this intense period of the war, he could not be spared for leave. He was killed at the Battle of El Alamein four months later.
News of his death filled Violette with an intense desire for vengeance. Soon after, out of the blue, she received an official army letter from a “Mr. Potter”, asking her to come to an interview at a hotel in central London. Although she did not yet know it, Violette had been contacted by the Special Operations Executive. The SOE had been set up with the intention of organizing opposition to the Nazis, especially in the territories they had conquered. Agents would be dropped by aircraft to rendezvous with local underground fighters, known as “the Resistance”. Factories, railway stations and military bases would be bombed. Troops would be ambushed, collaborators assassinated. Where possible, their job was also to stir up civil unrest against the Germans.
The SOE was a secret organization of course, so they could hardly place advertisements in newspapers asking for volunteers. Instead, they recruited more obliquely. Violette’s army file noted that she was half-French and bilingual in English and French – qualities which would make her a useful agent.
At the hotel, Violette was directed into a bare room with two chairs and a table. Sitting across from her was “Mr. Potter” – who was actually Major Selwyn Jepson, a recruitment officer for the SOE. He spoke to her mostly in French, explaining that he was looking for people to do “dangerous work” in France. Violette leapt at the chance so readily, Jepson was instantly wary. Impulsiveness was a character trait most unsuited to spying. He asked her to return in a week, to discuss the matter further.
When they met again Jepson did not mince his words. There was a one in four chance that she would be killed, he said. Violette was unperturbed by this, but did make detailed inquiries about her army pension, and financial support for her daughter should she die. At this meeting, Jepson’s doubts about her receded. Her enthusiasm, he decided, was genuine, and driven by a desire to avenge her husband’s death.
So Violette was recruited, and began to train intensively for her role. Although women were not expected to take part in front line combat, the military made an exception with SOE agents. First she was sent for a three week fitness course to toughen her up. She had always been good at sports, and cycled a lot as a teenager, so she was in good shape already. Then she went up to Scotland to learn how to fight – how to fire a machine gun, kill a guard silently and with her bare hands, destroy bridges and railway lines with explosives, lay an ambush, storm a house – all of which were not considered very ladylike pursuits, especially in the 1940s.
The final part of her training was the most secret of all. She was taught how the Nazis controlled their conquered populations with a mixture of intimidation and cooperation with collaborators. She learned how to assume the identity of another person – whatever alias she would be given on her mission – and how to parachute from an aircraft without breaking a leg. Despite the odd mishap, such as a bad sprain in parachute training, Violette proved a natural in all these activities. But she did struggle with her codes – essential for agents to transmit details of their activities home in secret. Her training complete, Violette was flown to France on her first mission. It was to be a particularly dangerous and difficult one. The German Gestapo (secret police) had made many arrests around Rouen, of a group of local Resistance members codenamed the “Salesman” circuit. Violette’s job was to assess the strength of those who had evaded capture. Dealing with the French Resistance was never easy. They were divided among themselves, between supporters of the Free French movement in London, and those who were communist. They were also infiltrated by German spies. In the wake of the Gestapo arrests, Violette would be arriving in an atmosphere fraught with fear and suspicion.
In April 1944, she was flown to France in a tiny Lysander aircraft, which could land and take off in a very small area. Flown over at the same time was a French SOE agent named Philippe Liewer, who had been a journalist before the war. They were dropped off in the countryside around Azay-le-Rideau, where they were met by a small party of Resistance fighters. Quickly hurried off to a safe house for the rest of the night, they went on to Paris the next day. Here Violette took a train to Rouen, to begin her mission. The journey itself was fraught, and full of opportunities for mistakes. German soldiers seemed to flock to Violette. She spent the whole trip refusing offers of assistance, of having her bag carried, of cigarettes… Violette fended off her admirers with a weary shrug – the way she thought a real French woman would act. She did not even want to speak to these soldiers – although her fluency in French was impeccable, she had the trace of an English accent. Perhaps the Germans would not have grasped her accent was imperfect, but the French anti-resistance militia, the Milice, who collaborated with the Germans, would not be fooled.
For three weeks she snooped around Rouen, trying to find out what had happened to the Resistance group there. She even visited the houses of known Resistance members. Not only did she have to remain undiscovered by the authorities, she had to convince those she came into contact with that she was a genuine British agent – not a spy sent by the Germans, or Milice, to winkle out more suspects. Violette had been thrown in at the deep end with a task requiring great tact and courage. Twice she was stopped by police, questioned, and released. She always remained calm, offering a convincing alias, and plausible reasons for being in Rouen. Neither did she let these narrow brushes with disaster deter her. She carried out her work with great skill, and established beyond doubt that the Salesman circuit had been well and truly broken.
Violette enjoyed being back in France – even under these dreadful circumstances. When her work in Rouen was finished, she took a train back to Paris where she had arranged to meet up with Philippe Liewer. From there they would go south to the countryside outside Chateauroux to be picked up by another Lysander. Violette had two days to herself in Paris. She roamed the streets, which she knew well from her youth, although wartime Paris was much drabber than the bustling city it once was. But there were still items to be had in the shops that could not be found in England. Violette picked up some perfume for herself and her mother. She also bought a beautiful dress for Tania, and some chic Parisian clothes for herself – three dresses and a sweater. Minor alterations were made to the fit, and Violette went to collect them on the morning she was due to return to England. After a final quick flit around the shops, she left.
On the night of April 30 she waited anxiously with Liewer for their planes to arrive – which could have been any time from 10:30pm to 1:30 the next morning. Each was to travel separately in a Lysander, with other French agents who were also being picked up. This arrangement tacitly acknowledged the danger of the flight back. If one plane was shot down and all aboard were killed, then at least the other would carry one agent who could tell the Special Operations Executive what had happened to the Salesman circuit. It was a well-justified fear. The pilot of Liewer’s plane was killed on his next mission.
The pick up was uneventful and Violette felt a surge of relief as the plane lurched off its bumpy runway to vanish into the dark. But outside Chateaudun the Lysander flew close to a German airfield. Immediately the sky was filled with searchlights, and anti-aircraft shells burst around the plane. Violette was terrified, and with good reason. The Lysander might have been able to land and take off on a matchbox, but it was a slow, lumbering aircraft, and was an easy target both for gunners on the ground and night fighter aircraft. The pilot twisted, turned, dived and banked to get away from the lights, and Violette was thrown violently around the aircraft cabin. But luck was with them and, as the plane flew on, the shell bursts grew fewer and more distant.
When they arrived at the RAF airfield of Tempsford, disaster struck again. The plane had had such a narrow escape over Chateaudun that the rubber on one of its wheels had been ripped to shreds. The landing was a near disaster. Violette was so disoriented she imagined they had crashed in France. When the pilot came to help her out of the plane she mistook him for a German come to arrest her. He was greeted with a bewildering tirade of angry French, but when Violette realized she was back in England, she flung her arms around him and gave him a kiss.
Now it was late spring, and an invasion of France from England was imminent. When the invasion came, Allied troops would land on the beaches of Normandy. It was also hoped that the French Resistance would rise up behind German lines to help them. Before and during the invasion, members of the SOE were dropped in France to organize such an uprising, and Violette was among them.
The invasion began at first light on June 6, 1944. The following night, Violette boarded a B-24 Liberator bomber at Tempsford, with Philippe Liewer and two other French agents. Whatever private fears they had about the parachute jump to come, and the mission ahead, they kept to themselves. The crew remember their four agents passing the time on the flight out by playing cards together. Before she jumped, Violette staggered around the lurching plane to kiss each member of the crew. When the B-24 flew over the “drop zone” – the area where Resistance members had agreed to meet them – lights were lit on the ground to let the pilot know they were waiting. Then, with a wink to her fellow agents, Violette jumped just after 1:30am. She landed safely and right on target – outside the village of Sussac close to the town of Limoges.
Supplies for the Resistance, and the agents’ personal possessions, were dropped in separate packages, and then hurriedly gathered up and bundled into waiting cars. All four agents were taken to a grocer’s shop in Sussac and given a meal and a bed for the night. Violette felt exhausted – she had been up almost all night – but huge relief too. An agent dropping into France at night never really knew who would be waiting for them. Sometimes they would be betrayed, or messages would be intercepted, and German soldiers would be there to meet them.
For this mission, Philippe Liewer had been charged with the difficult job of directing Resistance forces around Limoges. Violette was there to help him. They had been briefed to expect a well-organized and professional team of fighting men and women. But the reality was very different. There were around 800 Resistance members under Liewer’s command, but they were untrained, with no experience of fighting, and led by what he described as “the most incapable people I have ever met.” Liewer found that different groups in the area refused to cooperate with each other. Also, they seemed very reluctant to engage their enemy. Not one of the targets they had been asked to strike before the agents arrived had been attacked. When Liewer tried to organize any attacks, he had to spend hours arguing his case to local commanders.
Barely a couple of days into his mission, Liewer lost patience with the men he had been sent to command. But he had other options. There were Resistance groups in nearby areas, and he made steps to contact them. Violette was ordered to meet up with a Jacques Poirier, the leader of a group about 160km (100 miles) to the south. So on the morning of June 10 she and another Resistance fighter named Jacques Dufour set off in a large black Citröen. The plan was for Dufour to take her halfway, and then for Violette to cycle the remaining distance. If they were stopped and questioned, either by German soldiers, or the Milice, they agreed to say that Violette was an antique dealer visiting one of her shops in the south.
A bicycle was strapped to the roof of the car, but Violette also insisted on taking a couple of Sten guns – small, light machine guns. Why they took the guns will forever remain a mystery. The likelihood of being stopped and searched was high, and there was no convincing reason why an antique dealer and her driver would be carrying these British combat weapons.
On the way down south, they picked up another Resistance member named Jean Bariaud, who would keep Dufour company on his way back to Sussac. Not long after they picked up Bariaud, at around ten o’clock that morning, they drove through the village of Salon-la-Tour. Straight ahead of them was a German roadblock. Soldiers immediately ordered the car to stop. They were bound to be searched. Dufour waved back in a friendly manner as he neared the roadblock, but 30m (33 yards) from the block he stopped the car suddenly and all three passengers jumped out. According to eyewitness reports, Bariaud, who was unarmed, ran up the road, but Dufour and Violette started firing at the soldiers with their Sten guns. Using the car as cover, Dufour kept up steady small bursts of fire, and shouted over to Violette to head for a wheat field next to the road, and then to some woods which were a few hundred yards away. Under heavy fire, Violette dashed into the wheat, and then began firing too, so Dufour could follow.
The wheat field may have been thick, but it was easy enough for the soldiers to track the position of their fleeing foes. Military vehicles raced up to the field, and machine gun fire raked the wheat. Soldiers soon surrounded the field, and whenever they saw wheat stalks twitching they would aim a withering burst of fire. Dufour and Violette made exhaustingly slow progress – fearing that every movement would bring a hail of bullets, but they edged slowly toward the woods. They fought well, both firing off occasional short blasts, to keep the soldiers from charging into the field after them.
By now Violette was exhausted. Her clothes were badly ripped, and she was covered with scratches. She told Dufour she did not have the strength to run through the woods, but she would cover his escape, firing toward the German soldiers as he crawled into the wood. She knew she would either die in the coming fight, or be shot as a spy soon after it, and she was sacrificing her own life for her comrade. Dufour could see she was in no mood to argue. He escaped from the field, and found a perfect hiding place – a haystack next to a nearby farm.
Here Dufour lay, still and silent. After half an hour German troops arrived, and with them was Violette Szabo. Peering though the hay, he noticed she was limping, and had probably sprained an ankle in the chase. Dufour could hear them angrily questioning her about him. She laughed and told them: “You can run after him. He is far away by now.” As she sat nearby, smoking a cigarette, the officer in charge of the soldiers told her she was the bravest woman he had ever met, and saluted as she was taken away.
The following day, Violette was driven to Limoges and, from there, to Fresnes prison on the outskirts of Paris. From here she was regularly taken for interrogation, to Gestapo headquarters at 84 avenue Foch in the middle of the city. Although she was questioned aggressively, and treated harshly, she was not tortured. Strangely, the Gestapo did not usually torture British agents, but were merciless with the French.
By early August 1944, the Gestapo decided they were not going to learn anything useful from Violette Szabo. On August 8 she left Paris for the last time, along with two other SOE agents, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe. Their destination was the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, in northern Germany. The three SOE women were taken to the Paris Gare de l’Est station, where they were joined by several other captured British agents and put on a train under heavy guard. The men were taken to a special prison carriage and the women were chained together and sat in ordinary compartments with an armed escort. The train moved to the German border so slowly they were still in France the following afternoon. Just after 2:00pm they were attacked by Allied planes. Although many on board fled as soon as the attack began, including the German guards, the prisoners were left chained together or locked in their carriages. As bullets buzzed around their heads, and bombs exploded nearby, Violette and another woman crawled through the train corridors with water for the men in the prison carriage, who had not been given anything to drink for several hours. When the planes flew off, the guards returned, and the journey continued.
Ravensbrück was not a death camp, like Auschwitz or Treblinka, but it was almost as grim. Although some prisoners were executed there, most were sent to Ravensbrück to work, but harsh conditions meant many died. Originally built to house 6,000 women prisoners, it was enlarged during the war to take 24,000. When Violette arrived, there were 80,000, crammed behind its barbed wire and electric fences.
Here the day began at 3:00 every morning, when prisoners were roused by a siren from their lice-ridden straw bedding, where they slept two to a bunk. Roll call was at 3:45am and prisoners had to stand for hours to be counted, in all weathers and seasons, dressed only in their thin prison clothes. Then, names were called for work parties, and they were marched off for the day.
By the time Violette reached Ravensbrück, she had grown painfully thin, but her spirit was far from crushed. She met other captured Resistance workers and immediately began to make plans to escape. But before long, Violette and 500 other women were transferred to another camp, named Torgau, on the River Elbe. They were set to work in a munitions factory. Here too she planned an escape, and got as far as obtaining a key for one of the camp gates. But a woman Violette did not know well found out. She was not trusted by her fellow prisoners, so Violette threw the key away before it was discovered.
Conditions at Torgau were much better than at Ravensbrück, but some of the women objected to working in an arms factory, producing shells and bullets for the Nazis. They refused to work. It was a brave but pointless stand. Fritz Sühren, the camp commandant at Ravensbrück, was called in to deal with the mutiny. Half the women were sent to another factory, and half, including Violette, were sent to a camp at Königsberg in East Prussia. Here, as autumn turned to winter, they were set to work in the fields and forests, clearing trees and vegetation from ground that had frozen hard. Not only did they have to wear the thin summer clothes they had arrived in – Violette had a blue silk frock with short sleeves – they were fed an inadequate diet of soup made of water and unwashed potato peelings.
This was treatment designed to break the spirit of even the hardiest soul, and Violette grew increasingly depressed. But, even here, prisoners found comfort in friendship. When Violette returned from the fields, frozen to the bone and in deep despair, one of her friends at the camp, Marie Lecomte, would hug her to warm her up, and give her food she had saved from her own paltry ration. In the depths of winter, as further punishment, the women were refused fuel for their hut heater. As December wore on, Violette and her fellow prisoners grew increasingly skeletal. Many of the women on work parties dropped down dead, from exhaustion and cold.
In early 1945, the authorities at Königsberg received orders to transfer Violette back to Ravensbrück. This was not good news. When she found out, Violette went at once to her friend Marie and sobbed in her arms. Certain she would be killed, Violette wrote her family’s address on a sheet of paper, and gave it to Marie. Then the two women made a pact: if either of them died, the other would look after their family. Just before Violette left, she kissed Marie seven times – one kiss for each member of the family she had left behind. She asked Marie to travel to London to tell them what had happened to her, and kiss them all from her.
Violette left Königsberg at 5:00 one morning, along with the two SOE agents who had been with her on the train from Paris – Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe. For some reason, the three women were given new clothing, and soap and a comb. Now Violette had a blouse, a skirt and a coat to fend off the cold, instead of her thin summer dress.
They arrived back in Ravensbrück to be placed immediately in solitary confinement. It was obvious that something was going to happen. Alone in her cell, Violette must have pondered the strange twists of fate that led her to Ravensbrück. If she had not chosen Etienne Szabo on that fateful day back in July 1940, the chain of events that had led her to captivity and imminent execution would never have begun.
The stay in Ravensbrück was brief. The war was coming to its inevitable end and Germany’s Nazi elite were determined to extract maximum vengeance before power was wrested away from them. At Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, a list of names of British agents due for immediate execution had been drawn up. The list included Violette, Denise and Lilian. A few days after their return, on a bleak February early evening, the sound of marching feet was heard outside their cell doors. The doors clanged open, and each woman was ordered out. They were marched as a group to a block next to the crematorium, close to the inner wall of the camp. Here, waiting for them was camp commandant Fritz Sühren, and a small party of other camp officials including the camp doctor, ready to carry out a grisly ritual.
Sühren read from a document informing the three women they were to be executed. Then, one by one, they were made to kneel down on a step between two camp buildings, and shot. As a method of execution it was, at least, mercifully brief. Denise and Lilian were too weak to stand without help, but Violette, still only 23, walked to her death with great courage. The last thing she saw was a bleak, narrow, dimly lit alley between two buildings, before a single bullet to the back of her neck ended her brief life. Immediately after the executions the three bodies were burned, and all traces of Violette, Denise and Lilian vanished from the face of the Earth.
When peace came to Europe, in the late spring of 1945, Violette’s family waited for news of their daughter. They knew that she had been captured by the Germans, but had no inkling of her fate. But as the spring turned to summer, and it slowly became obvious that Violette was not among the survivors of liberated prisoner-of-war and concentration camps, they began to fear the worst. To put an end to the uncertainty, SOE dispatched some of their staff to discover what had happened to their missing agents. Camp officials at Ravensbrück were interrogated, and it was established that Violette Szabo had been executed in February 1945 – a mere three months before the end of the war.
Marie Lecomte, Violette’s friend at Königsberg, survived the war. When she tried to get in touch with Violette’s family via the British military authorities, she was discouraged from doing so. Perhaps they felt that hearing an account of the last desperate months of Violette’s life would be too painful for the family. For years Marie was haunted by her failure. She ran a restaurant at Morlaix, and whenever British people visited, she would ask if they knew Violette’s family. Then, in 1958, sorting though some old possessions, she discovered a newspaper cutting about Violette and her family, published a year or so after the war had ended. At the time she was given it, Marie had been extremely ill, and had not realized its significance. The newspaper was contacted, and Marie was put in touch with the Bushell family. She visited them, and was finally able to kiss each one, just as she had promised.