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Hi, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit.

We Got a True Hero on the podcast. In fact, we go to Claire Muhly brilliant historian talking about true here on the podcast, Christina Skarbek. She is my daughter's favorite spy from the Second World War.

You're not going to believe this story if you've never heard of Christina Skarbek, just sit back and enjoy.

She is one of the more remarkable figures to have emerged from that truly extraordinary conflict. She is the subject of a biography written by Claire Malik. Recently, she's been on talking about the woman who started to save the children, Eglantine Jebb.

She has also written this amazing joint biography of the two women that were the heart of the Third Reich's aviation R&D.

Basically extraordinary, extraordinary women.

If you want to watch a lot of aviation history, it is available on history hit TV. You just use the code pod one, pod one, and then you get a month for free and your second month, which just £1 euro or dollar at unbelievably cheap, it takes you through these coming months, which are probably going to be a little bit challenging. So please head over to history, hit TV, used Kopenawa and watch and listen to all that amazing historical content.

In the meantime, everyone here is Claire Mulle talking about Christina Skarbek.

Good to have you back on the podcast. Lovely to be back. Thank you very much. I think this is one of the greatest espionage stories of the Second World War. She's a truly remarkable woman, isn't she?

She's absolutely extraordinary. That is total inspiration for me. And I saw that your daughter did a wonderful picture of her a little while ago, so I love that as well. But yes, she was not just Britain's first female special agent at the second war. She was actually the longest serving special agent for Britain, male or female. And I would argue one of the most significant achievements really made a significant impact on the allied war effort, where she from.

So she was born in Poland. Her father was an aristocrat, a Roman Catholic Polish aristocrat. Her mother had been born Jewish but had converted to marry her dad. And she grew up with a lot of focus attention on her. But she was expected to be a sort of a perfect counter dance. Polynesia's wear white gloves, that sort of thing. And that wasn't her at all. In fact, her father on their states taught her to shoot. She rode horses.

She always loved the outdoor life and she wanted a life of endeavor and adventure. But she was also brought up to be a passionate Polish patriot. And this was, you know, one of the most defining features of her. She had this passionate love of freedom, both for Poland when it came to the Second World War, for her adopted country, Britain, and for all of the allies, but also for herself personally. That was one of her real motivators.

She wanted freedom and independence.

That's fascinating. So her personal journey sort of mapped onto the national story of Poland in the second while she was she was someone individually and also strategically, politically was struggling for autonomy. Yeah.

And in a sense, actually, her life can be seen. I mean, I want to make too much of this, but a little bit of a metaphor for Poland. You know, the first of the allies, she's the first Asian serving alongside. But that relationship, of course, changes over time. And at the end of the war, perhaps not Britain's finest moment when it came to Poland or to Christina personally, although in the long term we are now honoring her today.

And I think the relationship is built again. So there is something in that.

So tell me, how did she become this remarkable agent for Britain? It's a fantastic story right from the get go.

So she was already married to her second husband by September 1939, and they were on their way to southern Africa for his diplomatic posting when the news came through of the Nazi Germany invasion of Poland. And they they they waited for further instructions. None came in the chaos of those early days. So they turned around and got the first ship they could back to Europe. They wanted to go back to their country and serve immediately as wartime conditions. They had to go slowly and convoy and so on.

And in fact, there's a particular story. Her husband wrote a memoir, which I don't recommend, but there are some great stories. And one is that on that ship back, the captain had a notice board to give instructions to or information to the passengers. And one day said on this note aboard lost a pair of ladies pink panties underneath it said lost Warsaw. And that was how they found that their capital had fallen to the enemy. And he said, perhaps this is a typical example of dry British sense of humor.

But for the Poles, it was an appalling way to find out what was happening back in Europe. So by the time the ship it docked at Southampton, her husband went off to join the Polish forces, which were reconvening in France at that point and played a significant role there. And he expected her to wait out a couple of months in London, you know, have a cocktail. But within two days, she is banging on the door of the supposedly secret special intelligence services building in London.

So she had her contacts and not so much volunteering as demanding to be taken on. And I can just imagine the look on the faces of the young men in there. There were all young men, of course, because first of all, she's Polish. She's not British, so she's disqualified immediately and then she's female. And there are no women being taken on in this role. But she's got not only the right languages and the right contacts, she's also got a brilliant plan for how to get into Poland under the radar, because when she was a rather bored countess before the war, she did a lot of skiing and she used to smuggle cigarettes across the high Tajoura Mountains.

She knew all the smuggling routes and she didn't she didn't even smoke. She didn't need the money. She was just doing it for kicks, for the thrill. And so she knew the Gurel Mountain people who were some of the first to resist. She knew how to get in and out under the radar so they couldn't afford not to take her on. And before Christmas 1939, that early, she was in position in Hungary ready to go on her first mission.

There was also a charisma, a beauty that made it almost impossible not to just fall in love with her. Well, yes.

I mean, my book is called The Spy Who Loved, and that's because she loved adrenaline and adventure. In fact, the British minister in Budapest said she had a pathological love of danger. He definitely fell in love with her. I've seen his love letters to her, which are very romantic. She loved she loved men. So she had two husbands. She had many lovers, many of whose lives she actually saved during the war because she worked alongside them.

She saved possibly six different individual men's lives. And who knows how many more through her achievements. But above all, she loved freedom and independence. But of course, she she presented often as this very seductive character. Before the war, she was a Polish beauty queen and she was a Miski and all that sort of thing. But she's just doing it to fill the time. It's not her most important characteristic, and she had when she wanted she had this great charisma.

She used that like all the other skills she had to good effect, but she could turn it off and become completely anonymous so she could sort of disappear in a crowd if she wanted to as well, which was actually one of her most important skills, because the reason they sent women out was not to do a Matahari or to be a honey trap. They sent women out because women are ignored. Women have that special magic skill of being invisible. So the Nazi Germans just if they saw able bodied men moving behind enemy lines, moving around France, for example, they obviously were questioned.

Then she went out. She was stopped once by the Gestapo. They searched the man next to her. She had some hand grenades in her knapsack under some cheese sandwiches. They didn't look, you know, women could move around because they were looking after families and running businesses sort of under the Nazi German radar. So that's partly why they sent her out, that her courage and contacts and so on.

She's extraordinarily hardy, physically fit, able. She knows everyone. She speaks the languages. She's got all these other skills, what the kind of mission she goes on.

Well, I mean, it's extraordinary what's in three different theaters of the war and it shouldn't have to serve at all. They estimated a six week life expectancy for her when they trained her up as a wireless operator, as obviously the Nazi Germans could pin the signals and then track the wireless transmitters. But she mainly went out as a courier. And so her first her was Eastern Europe. She had four missions into Nazi occupied Poland. She was bringing in money for the fledgling resistance, propaganda information and so on.

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

So this was the first film evidence of German plans for Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of their erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, and she knew the importance of there. So she she hid it inside her gloves. She smuggled it across more than one border and eventually got it to the British attache in Sofia. He got it to Churchill. And when Churchill saw it, he had it checked through his ultra sources. So Enigma, he believed it and he got in touch with Stalin on that basis.

So this the information she's smuggling is not small fry stuff. I mean, this had the potential to change the course of the war. And at that point, Churchill actually told his daughter, Sarah, that Christine was his favorite spy. I mean, this is just the start, actually. She was arrested a couple of times there. But then the what made her most legendary was not in Eastern Europe or Egypt in the Middle East, but in occupied France in 1944.

That's where her real achievements took place.

You mean she got arrested? What do you mean she got arrested? You don't get arrested as a Polish aristocrat, there's about five different reasons why she did not want to get arrested. So exactly.

She she was caught twice, once in Poland and Hungary and managed to talk her way out. I mean, how incredible speed of thought under situations of intense stress. So she was captured once in the mountains with another Polish courier called Vladimir Wachowski. And the two of them were kept under armed guard while a train station master who had found them went to get the Gestapo and the guards went through all her bags and so on. And she realized that they were not motivated by politics, these men, because as soon as they came across any of these bundles of money she was given to give to the resistance, they divide it up between themselves and put it in their pockets.

So she was wearing under her collar a cut glass necklace that Vladimir had given to her as a love token, actually, when she was well under her shirt so that one of her other lovers didn't see it and how she got out and started fiddling with it and saying, oh, my diamonds. Of course, they weren't diamonds at all. It was a cheap necklace, but the guards didn't know that. So they lunge for it. And as they did, she pulled the string and these beads fell into the grass, the wet grass, and the two men lunged to get these diamonds as they thought they were before they would disappear.

And she kicked the gun out of the way and she and Vladimir ran into the forest and managed to successfully get away. I mean, that's just one account. There's another one in in Hungary, she and Andre Kawecki, another resistance hero who so Britain actually is a special agent, better known as Andrew Kennedy, were both arrested and taken away for quite brutal interrogation. And at that point, when you are, you know, arrested by the Gestapo and in a prison being interrogated, normally that is it.

But Christine, by this point, had caught a bit of a cough. She was getting a flu and she decided to make a virtue of her apparent weakness, which was this hacking cough that she had. And so she well, I looked in the British files and the report in the British archives simply says that Christine showed great presence of mind. And what that meant was she she bit her own tongue so hard and repeatedly that it bled copiously and as she coughed, it looked as if she was coughing up blood, which is the symptom of TB, tuberculosis.

And the Germans were rightly terrified of the disease and threw both him and Christine out, thereby saving them. You know, she saved their lives and they got away across the border. She she got smuggled across in the British ambassador's in the boot of his car across the border. So, I mean, that's just two of the occasions.

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Your last stop from the Hajazi Akehurst recommends podcast's we love. Hi Sabina Brenan here, host of Superbrain, the podcast for everyone with a brain. I have a passion for people and a fascination for the human brain. That's why I became a psychologist and neuroscientist. On Mondays, I pick the brains of inspiring guests about thriving and surviving in life. And on Thursdays I share insights and hacks to help you to understand and unleash your inner superbrain to join me each week.

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It's completely extraordinary. But you mentioned her best work was probably done in the West. So tell me about that. Yes. So she was parachuted into France in the summer of 1944, and her brief was to support and serve as courier to a man called Francis Kummetz, actually Michaloliakos uncle. And he was the Essawi coordinator in the south of France, preparing with the French Resistance for the allied liberation forces coming in in D-Day in the south, which, as you may know, happened a couple of weeks after D-Day in Normandy.

They were largely American and British forces coming in. So they had to keep various roads open, shut other routes and so on to arrange the communications locally. They've been caught up in a battle, the Battle of Air Corps, which Paddy Ashdown wrote about memorably. And then after that, Christine made her own way. And two of her biggest achievements, I think three with the microfilm I mentioned, but in this arena was that she she went up into the mountains and she made the first contact between the French Resistance in the area and the Italian partisans on the other side of the Alps.

She had a gun battle and managed to circle around until she went to the Italian side and made contact with Giordano, who was the Italian leader in the area, and took back his request for ammunition, shoes and packed meat. That's what he wanted, apparently for his resistance army so she could get those supplies to him. And then while she was in the mountains as well, she made some investigations and discovered that there was a German garrison that had a significant number of conscripted Poles serving under the Nazis.

They were partly forced into service by threats to their families. Some of them were ethnic Germans and so on, a variety of different groups. And she risked everything by climbing up the mountain from the back end of the garrison so the German generals wouldn't see her wearing a white and red scarf, which are the colors of Poland. And she she was obviously highlighting herself not as a local peasant woman, but to show them she wanted to talk pole to pole.

And amazingly, they let her up to the top and she spoke to them for a couple of hours and persuaded them to take the British box out of the big guns to bring back the small arms. And she secured the defection of that garrison on this important pass called the Cold Arch, an announced. And then she came down from the mountain, discovered three of the main men she worked with, including Francis Commerz, had been arrested and on her own secured their release just hours before they were due to be executed, shot in a football field and got all three men out so that some of it surely she was one of the best intelligence agents, irrespective of her sex.

I mean, she was one of the best in the Second World War. I mean, extraordinary stories.

Yeah, absolutely. I think her contribution was very significant, the the microfilm for Operation Barbarossa and then the work in southern France in particular, although she also had some active service in the Middle East as well and did some sort of espionage based work really rather than special operations there as well. So it's an incredibly impressive six years missions. And she was, of course, given very high honours. She was given the OBE and the George Medal by Britain and the French gave her also the contigo with one star.

So, yes, is this significant contribution. But I think it's important that we do talk about it in the context of her gender, because that's partly why she's been so much forgotten. Really?

Why then was she forgotten? Is it because her life after the war was complicated and therefore didn't make for the ideal press copy part of all those things?

I mean, at the end of the war, she was given these honours, very high level honours, but she actually refused to accept them because she wasn't given what she would have valued more highly, which was ongoing British citizenship or ongoing work worthy of her service and experience. So she'd been serving under temporary British passport, which had been renewed repeatedly during the war since around 1941 at the end of the war. They just didn't renew it. And she was left high and dry in Cairo.

And she actually said, you know, she knew she couldn't go back to Poland, which now had this Soviet backed communist regime. And her brother, who had fought in the resistance during the war, he actually died in the first year of the peace in a communist jail in Warsaw. So she knew she couldn't go back and the British knew she couldn't go back because at one point they'd actually traded her name for the name of an operative. So if she had gone back, should have been arrested immediately and almost certainly executed.

So she was left high and dry without citizenship. And she actually said to Britain, I refuse to accept these honours unless you make me a citizen of your country. No, she put her life on the line for six years. So she kind of was shamed into becoming a British citizen. But I think even then, she kind of falls between the gaps because for the British, she was almost too Polish to be really British for the Poles. She had you know, she served Britain directly.

So was she more of a British agent? She was a woman working in a field that most people at the time considered a male field. So she was too female to be male. But then after the war, she was you know, she didn't sort of fit anywhere. She was part Jewish. And so she fell between the gaps. And and a lot of that is to do with her gender as well. Even today, when we remember women in the Resistance and the female special agents specifically, we tend to focus on their beauty.

And I've got to say, not all of them are beautiful. You don't have to be beautiful to be a special agent. In fact, there are the massively diverse group. We have one with one leg, although she was quite beautiful. We had grandmothers, all sorts. We focus on their beauty. We focus on their courage and sometimes for paying the ultimate sacrifice, you know, and we need to, of course, recognize and honor those things.

But what we're less good at talking about is the women's achievements. And you cannot get a better example of that than Christina Skarbek, Christine Grandville for being so effective in the role. And many of the women were so so I think because she was so effective, but she did survive the war, she's had less attention than perhaps some of the others.

Tell me briefly about her death. It's just so bloody tragic. Seven years after the end of the war in 1952, Christina was living in London. She'd had various not brilliant jobs to build a hatcheck girl and a waitress. And she was working as a bathroom stewardess on the castle, shipping in coastal shipping lines. I think that gave her some sort of freedom and travel that she wouldn't have had otherwise. And the captain on one of the ships she'd served on had said if any any of the staff had received any honors during the war, they should wear their medals.

So she put on this incredible array of ribbons, you know, the Quadriga the Doors Medal, the Obbie, she had all these four different service medals and the war medal. I mean, an incredible array. And the other people on the ship that just didn't like it, they were like, who's this woman who's got these medals? You know, obviously she's stolen them or, you know, she had quite a strong Polish accent. So how much is she Jewish?

You know, and she was treated horrendously. It's just so appalling. And that's why different nationalities serving on that ship. So except one man stood up for her, was another bathroom steward, and that they became friends for a while. But some months later, back in Britain, she had her cycles of Polish war hero stuck in London, British Essawi agents who she served with. And this guy didn't fit in with that group. He was jealous.

He was difficult. He was quite possessive. And nobody is going to possess Christine. So she dumped him and he got married and he unfortunately became her her stalker. He followed her. He wrote to her obsessively. She burned his letters and eventually he confronted her by surprise. She wasn't expecting him. And he came to where she was living and he stabbed her through the heart with a commando knife. She died within seconds. Just after that, she was given six weeks life expectancy.

She served for around six years the entire war. And then that was her end. And the greatest tragedy, of course, is that she never lived to see her country, her birth country, Poland, free again. So tragic.

You wrote a book a while ago about this last name of the book.

There it is, The Spy who loved because she loved freedom and independence and other things, too. Why are we talking about her now? Because yesterday, about six years after I first proposed, they're absolutely delighted to unveil a new English heritage blue plaque. To Christina Skarbek, Christine Granville, it's at the Stella Hotel. Actually, it was it used to be a hotel in London. Insaaf can run by the Polish Relief Society, which helped Poles stuck in Britain without income.

And now it's a hotel called number one Lexcen Gardens Hotel. And it went up yesterday. So you can see it there on the wall on the first floor outside the room where she stayed.

Well, it's a huge achievement. So well done. You thank you very much. Came back on this podcast. Thanks again. Thank you very much. Cheers.

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