Odette’s Ordeal

On a May day in 1943, several German officers sat beneath a cut-glass chandelier in an elegantly decorated room filled with sunlight. The room served as a court at 84 Avenue Foch, Parisian headquarters of the German Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, whose brutal methods were feared throughout Europe. 

The court’s attention was focused on a bedraggled French woman who sat before them. She had just spent a month in prison, where she had been forbidden to bathe, exercise or change her clothes. Her feet were bandaged where she had been tortured, but she looked far from broken – in fact she seemed to project a curious, detached kind of dignity, as if she were indifferent to her surroundings. Her name was Odette Sansom, housewife turned British spy, and she was on trial for her life.

Odette, who spoke no German, soon became bored, and her eyes wandered around the room. But when the bemedalled colonel who was obviously in charge of the proceedings stood up and read a statement to her, she knew the trial had ended.

She shrugged wearily and told the court she did not speak German. The colonel frowned and explained in halting French that she had been sentenced to death on two counts. One as a British spy, the other as a member of the French Resistance.

Odette looked on the stiff, pompous men before her with scorn, and a giggle rose inside her. “Gentlemen,” she said, “you must take your pick of the counts. I can die only once.”

Odette had led a life that hardened her to the tribulations she now faced. She was born Odette Brailly, in Amiens, France, in 1912. When she was four, her father had been killed in the First World War. At seven, she caught polio and was blinded for a year, and then spent another year unable to move her limbs. These disabilities turned her into a fiercely independent character. The teenage Odette was remembered as a loyal friend and merciless enemy.

During the First World War, her mother had provided lodgings for English officers. Odette had liked them all immensely, and grew up determined to marry an Englishman. At 19 she did. His name was Roy Sansom. They moved to England in 1932. Odette’s years before the Second World War were spent raising three daughters and living the life of an English housewife in Somerset.

War broke out in 1939 and, in less than two years, Nazi Germany had conquered almost all of Europe. When France fell in 1940, it caused Odette much grief. Cut off from her family, she worried constantly about their safety.

In the spring of 1942, Odette heard a government radio broadcast appealing for snapshots of French beaches. An invasion of France from Britain was being planned, and such photos would help decide which beaches were best for landing troops. Odette had spent her childhood by the sea, so wrote to offer her help.

Shortly afterwards an official letter arrived asking her to come up to London. Here she met a man in a shabby back room office, in a building off Oxford Street. They talked for a while and she placed an envelope of her photos on his desk. To Odette’s surprise, he pushed them to one side and looked at her closely.

“Actually,” he said with a brisk smile, “we’re not really interested in your photos. What we’d really like you to do is go to France as a spy.”

Odette was flabbergasted.

“Look, I’m a housewife,” she said with some exasperation. “I’m not particularly bright and I don’t know a thing about spying. I’m sorry. I’ll have to say no to you.”

“Very well,” said the man, who seemed quite unperturbed. “That’s quite understandable. But, here, take my number. If you change your mind, just telephone.”

Over the next week Odette could not decide what to do. She was torn between her own patriotic feelings for France, and the responsibility she felt for her three children in England. Eventually she decided she would train as a spy, and found a convent boarding school for her daughters. Odette’s work was so secret she could not even tell her family and friends what she was doing. She told them instead that she had joined the Army to work as a nurse.

She joined a branch of the British secret service called the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which sent agents overseas. As soon as her training began, the dangers that would face her were made alarmingly clear. “In many ways it’s a beastly job,” said her commanding officer, Major Buckmaster. “You will be living a gigantic lie for months on end. And if you slip up and get caught, we can do little to save you.” In wartime, the fate of a captured spy was almost always execution.

Physical fitness and combat training toughened Odette. She also learned specialized skills, such as which fields were best for aircraft to make secret landings, and how to tell the difference between various kinds of German military uniforms.

Buckmaster had mixed feelings about Odette. He felt she had a temperamental and impulsive nature which could endanger her and any other agents she would work with. “Her main asset is her patriotism and keenness to do something for France,” he wrote in a report. “Her main weakness is a complete unwillingness to admit that she could ever be wrong.”

In Odette’s final days in England, before she went to France, the British secret service made sure her appearance looked as French as possible. She was given a new wardrobe of authentic French clothes, as anything with an English label on it would betray her. But tiny details were taken care of too. The English fillings in her teeth, for example, were taken out and replaced with French ones, and even her wedding ring was replaced with one that had been made in France.

On Odette’s last meeting with Major Buckmaster, he supplied her with several different drugs to help with her work. There were sickness pills, energy pills, sleeping pills and, most sinister of all, a brown, pea-sized suicide pill. Buckmaster told her it would kill her in six seconds. “It’s rather a horrible going away present,” he said, “so I’ve also brought you this,” and gave her a beautiful silver compact.

Odette was flown over to France in November 1942. She began working in Cannes with a group of secret service agents led by a British officer named Peter Churchill. She acted as a courier, delivering money to pay for the work of the Resistance – French men and women who continued to fight the Germans in France even though their country had surrendered. The British secret service worked closely with the Resistance, organizing bands of guerrilla fighters, assisting in sabotage operations and sending back information to England.

Odette picked up stolen maps and documents from the Resistance to pass back to Britain. She found “safe houses” for other spies and suitable locations for aircraft to land with agents or drop weapons by parachute. Peter Churchill was impressed with her. His new agent was quick-thinking, and capable. He thought she was very funny and seemed to possess an unstoppable determination.

Her job was very difficult and danger lurked at every turn. The Germans were constantly arresting Resistance members, and anyone Odette met in her work could be a double-agent. Eventually the group was betrayed by a traitor named Roger Bardet, who worked for German Military Intelligence – the Abwehr. Churchill and Odette were arrested on April 16, 1943. Even as they were being bundled off at gunpoint, Odette had the presence of mind to hide Churchill’s wallet, which contained radio codes and names of other agents, by stuffing it down the side of a car seat on their way to prison.

There was no point denying they were British agents, but Odette spun a complex tale for her captors, hoping at least to save Peter Churchill’s life. She said that that they were married to each other, and Churchill was related to the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. This was a complete lie. Her “husband”, she went on, was an amateur dabbler who had come to France on her insistence. It was she who had led the local resistance ring, and she who should be shot. She told the story so convincingly the Germans swallowed it completely.

A month after their arrest, both of them were taken to Fresnes – a huge jail on the outskirts of Paris. Odette was placed in cell No. 108, and a campaign to break her spirit began. Outside her door a notice read: “No books. No showers. No packages. No exercise. No privileges.”

This was where Odette’s interrogation by the Abwehr began in earnest. But she also began her own campaign to survive. With a hairpin she carved a calendar on the wall and marked every day. A grate set high in the wall covered an air vent which led to the cell below, and she was able to talk to a fellow prisoner named Michelle. This was a great comfort, as part of her punishment was that she was allowed no contact with other prisoners. Apart from frequent visits to her interrogators, she had no human contact other than an occasional visit by a German priest named Paul Heinerz.

The window in Odette’s cell was made of opaque glass. Michelle whispered up to her: “Break that glass pane at once! If you can see even a little blue sky, or the crescent of the Moon, it will be a wonderful sight in your dreary cell. The guards, they’ll punish you to be sure. They’ll probably stop your food for a few days. It’s tasteless slop anyway! Believe me, when you can see outside, you’ll feel it’s been worth it.” Odette didn’t think twice.

After two weeks of interrogation, the Abwehr realized their prisoner was not going to tell them anything useful and Odette was taken instead to Gestapo headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch. On her very first visit she was given a large meal. But despite her ravenous hunger, she only ate a little. She knew the meal was intended to make her sleepy and dull-witted.

Her interviewer this time was a sophisticated young man, with Nordic good looks, who smelled of cold baths and eau de Cologne. He was polite, but Odette knew she was dealing with someone who was prepared to be far more brutal than the Abwehr. She was right – this urbane young man was actually a trained torturer. But his questions about Odette’s Resistance activity were met with her stock response: “I have nothing to say”. The interview came to an end and Odette was returned to Fresnes for the night.

She knew her visit to the Gestapo the next day would be more difficult. The suave young man told her he had run out of patience. Her stomach turned over as a shadowy assistant slipped into the room and stood menacingly behind her. First this man applied a red-hot poker to the small of her back. Still Odette would not talk. Then he removed her toenails one by one.

Throughout this torture Odette gave no cry, although she expected to faint several times. As she was asked the same set of questions, she replied with the same answer: “I have nothing to say.”

The young man offered her a cigarette and a cup of tea – a standard tactic by torturers, who hope to catch their victims off guard by showing them unexpected kindness. Although she was in great pain, Odette felt elated. She had kept silent and won her own victory over these inhuman thugs.

Her questioner told her they were now going to remove her fingernails, and Odette’s courage wavered. But help came from an unexpected quarter. Just as they were about to start on her hands, another Gestapo man came into the cell. “Ach, stop wasting your time,” he said. “You’ll get nothing more from this one.”

Odette was taken back to her cell at Fresnes, where she bound her injured feet in strips of wet cloth. Then she lay on her cell bed, sick with fear at what the Gestapo would do next. Michelle called throughout the night but she was too weak to answer. Father Heinerz visited. He was so disgusted he could not speak. He kissed her head and left. A few days later, she was summoned to the Gestapo court in the chandeliered ceiling room at Avenue Foch, and sentenced to death.

Returning to her cell after the trial, Odette felt unexpectedly calm. Throughout her torture, she had not betrayed her fellow agents. Most of those she knew were still free to continue their work fighting against the Nazis. Alone on her bunk, she bid a silent good night to each of her three daughters and fell sound asleep. But in the early hours she woke with a start. There was no date for her execution. From now on, every footstep outside her door could turn out to be a guard detachment, arriving to escort her to a firing squad.

Despite this constant threat, Odette was determined not to give up hope. Her story about being related to Prime Minister Churchill had been widely repeated among the prison authorities. Many of the staff who guarded Odette were unusually courteous with her. Like many people in 1943, they had realized the war was going badly for Germany and thought that it would pay to keep on the right side of one of Winston Churchill’s “relations”.

As summer turned to autumn, Odette fell gravely ill and was moved to a warmer cell. She was also given a job in the prison sewing room and ordered to make German army uniforms. This she refused to do, saying she would make dolls instead. Amazingly, the prison staff let her do this.

Over the winter her health improved but, in May 1944, news came that she was to be transferred to a prison in Germany. As she left, Odette caught sight of one of her interrogators and waved at him gaily, shouting “Goodbye, goodbye.” She was determined to let him know he had not broken her spirit.

In the van that took her away were seven other women. They all immediately recognized each other as fellow SOE agents. All instinctively felt they were being taken to Germany to be executed, but they were still delighted to see each other. Their instincts were right. Within a year, all but Odette would be dead.

On the way through Paris, they stopped at Avenue Foch where a Gestapo officer asked if there was anything they wanted. Odette ordered a pot of tea, “…not as it is made in France or Germany, but in the English manner. One spoonful for each person and one for the pot. With milk and sugar please.” The tea duly arrived, with china cups and saucers.

Odette was placed on an east-bound train with an armed guard, and spent the next few weeks in several prisons. Once she was presented to a Nazi newspaper reporter who crowed that there were now three Churchills in German prisons, and he was to write a feature on her. Odette dismissed him with a barbed remark, but this was good news. If the Nazis were publicizing her imprisonment, they were hardly likely to execute her immediately.

In July 1944, she was taken to Ravensbrück – a Nazi concentration camp for women on the shore of swampy Lake Fürstenburg. Even the name of the camp, the “Bridge of Ravens”, sounded sinister.

Inside its barbed-wire perimeter were row upon row of shabby prisoners’ huts, patrolled by guards with whips and savage dogs. All of Ravensbrück’s inmates had shaven heads, to cut down on the lice that constantly plagued them. Prisoners who had been there for months or years had been so badly fed they looked like walking skeletons.

Smoke from the camp crematorium constantly filled the sky, scattering a ghastly pall of dust and ashes over the stark, grey interior. The Nazis sent their enemies here to be worked to death and, every morning, those who had died in the night were carried away in crude wooden handcarts. As a young girl walking the cliffs of Normandy, Odette had sometimes wondered where she would die. As she entered Ravensbrück, she felt she knew the answer.

The commandant of the camp, a German officer named Fritz Sühren, was eager to meet Odette. When she was taken before him, she noticed how clean and well fed he looked. Like most of her captors, Sühren was interested in her connection with Winston Churchill. He ordered her to be placed in “the bunker” – the camp’s own solitary confinement cells.

Odette’s bunker cell was pitch black and for three months she was kept there in total darkness. But she had been blind for a year of her childhood. She was used to the dark. She passed the time thinking about her three daughters, and how they had grown from babies into young girls. She decided to clothe them in her imagination, stitch by stitch, garment by garment. So completely did she fill her days deciding on the fabric, shades and style of these clothes, that whenever she was visited by camp guards, it seemed like an interruption, rather than the chance to make contact with another human being.

In August, southern France was invaded by French, British and American forces. This was where Odette had done most of her Resistance work. As a spiteful punishment, the guards turned the central heating in her cell to maximum. Odette wrapped herself in a blanket soaked in cold water, but this did not stop her from becoming terribly ill. Near death, she was taken to the camp hospital. It was a strange way to treat someone who had been sentenced to execution. Perhaps the Nazis were still hoping they could break her and she would tell them about her Resistance work.

Away from the bunker, Odette recovered her strength and was returned to her cell. On the way back she found a single leaf that had blown into the treeless camp, and scooped it into her clothing. In her dark world she would trace its spine and shape with her hands, and think about how the wind had blown a seed into the earth which had grown to a tree with leaves and branches that rustled in the wind and basked in the sunlight.

Over the next few months she overheard the execution of several of her fellow agents, all of whom were shot during the winter.

On April 27, 1945, Sühren visited her. He stood at the cell door then drew his finger across his throat. “You’ll leave tomorrow morning at six o’clock,” he said. Odette wondered if the end had come at last. On April 28 she would be 33. It would be a pity to be shot on her birthday.

When morning came she could hear the chaos that had overtaken the camp. Sühren arrived and bundled her into a large black van with a handful of other inmates. Through the window she could see the guards fleeing from the camp.

The van, together with an escort of SS troops (elite Nazi soldiers), drove west. It soon became clear to Odette that the war was almost over. For the next three days Sühren, his SS escort, and his small band of prisoners, drove from one camp to another as Germany collapsed into anarchy. Many of the prisoners in these camps, so near to freedom but so close to death, were almost hysterical. Some whooped and screamed, making huge bonfires of anything they could find to burn. Others collapsed from hunger, or rushed at their guards only to be gunned down. It all seemed like a delirious nightmare.

On the fourth day away from Ravensbrück, a guard grabbed Odette and dragged her before Sühren. She was told not to bring her few belongings, and was certain she was to be executed. Thrown into Sühren’s large staff car, and with an escort of SS guards in two other cars, she sped away from the camp.

After two hours, the three cars stopped by a deserted field and Sühren barked, “Get out.” But this was not to be Odette’s place of execution. Instead Sühren offered her a sandwich and a glass of wine, and told her he was handing her over to the Americans. At first she thought this was a cruel joke, but he seemed serious enough. Clearly he thought safely delivering Winston Churchill’s relative would get him off to a good start with his captors.

The SS guards spent the next few hours burning incriminating Ravensbrück documents. Then, at 10:00 that night, they drove into a village which had been occupied by American soldiers. Sühren marched up to an officer and said, “This is Frau Churchill. She has been a prisoner. She is a relative of Winston Churchill.” He handed Odette his revolver and surrendered.

The Americans offered her a place to sleep, but Odette wanted to spend her first night of freedom out in the open. She walked over to Sühren’s abandoned open-topped car and sat in the front seat, feeling neither triumph nor elation, just utter exhaustion. Nearby was a party of SS soldiers who had been part of Sühren’s escort. One came over and gave her his sheepskin coat to ward off the chill of the night.

To Odette, this act of kindness by a former enemy seemed part of a strange dream, and she expected to wake at any moment and find herself back in the bunker at Ravensbrück. But the dream continued. She nestled into the coat and stared up at the stars. The village clock chimed its quarter hours throughout the night, and it was so quiet she could hear her heart beating.

Following her release, Odette returned to England, after ensuring that Fritz Sühren’s American captors were aware that he had been commandant of Ravensbrück. (He was later tried as a war criminal and executed.)

She had several operations on her injured feet before she was able to walk properly again. In 1946, she became the first woman to be given the George Cross, Britain’s highest civilian award for bravery, “for courage, endurance and self sacrifice of the highest possible order”. She always insisted that the medal had not been given to her personally, but in recognition of the bravery of all French resistance workers.

The medal was stolen a few years later. But following a series of outraged newspaper articles in Britain’s national press, it was returned with a letter of apology from the anonymous burglar.

In 1948, after her first husband had died, she married Peter Churchill, the man she had suffered so much to protect. But after eight years they parted, and Odette later married Geoffrey Hallowes, another secret service veteran. In later life she co-founded the British “Woman of the Year” award, worked for charities and spent many hours writing to thousands of people with problems, who had contacted her for advice or inspiration.

Odette Sansom’s life as a secret agent was portrayed in the 1950 British film Odette, starring Anna Neagle. It was partially shot at Fresnes Prison, Paris, where Odette herself had been held prisoner. She worked as an advisor on the film, but seeing Anna Neagle relive her worst moments was a very painful experience.

She returned to Ravensbrück in 1994, for a ceremony to unveil a plaque commemorating the courage of the British SOE women who had died there. Looking back on the war, Odette wrote: “I am a very ordinary woman, to whom the chance has been given to see human beings at their best and at their worst.”

She died in 1995, aged 82.