The Spy Who Loved: the secrets and lives of one of Britain's bravest wartime heroines

Product Information

In Budapest, in January 1941, she showed her penchant for stratagem when she and Kowerski were arrested by the Hungarian police and imprisoned and questioned by the Gestapo. In Istanbul, they met with exiled Poles, and Skarbek tried to ensure that the courier routes from Istanbul to Poland remained functional. Her mother was from a Jewish banking background and they lived a somewhat idyllic life until her father died in 1930. As Sam Leith notes in The Spy Who Loved , hers was a life of daring missions, exploding cigars, and microfilm sewn into the lining of Krystyna's gloves.

Krystyna Skarbek showed that, with courage, determination and creativity one person can have a disproportionate impact on events. Krystyna was incredibly charming and intelligent, but also fraught with strange insecurities; she had both her noble eccentricities and bouts of snobbish pouting. Concerned about the condition of the prisons, he brought to the government's attention the dreadful state of the existing jail, the Prochownia, and designed and helped build a new jail, later known as the Pawiak.Her courage, quick wit, and determination won her release from arrest more than once, and saved the lives of several fellow officers - including one of her many lovers - just hours before their execution by the Gestapo.

Posing as a powerful British official, she persuaded the captors that a British invasion was imminent and they would meet a horrible death if they executed Cammaerts and the others. On 16 March 2021 author Dana Schwartz released a podcast episode about the life of Krystyna Skarbek, "From Poland With Love". Number 1 Lexham Gardens, Kensington – then the Shellbourne Hotel – was Granville’s home for the last three years of her extraordinary life.A brilliant account of a remarkable woman, one of those countless people often reduced to footnotes in larger broader histoory boos who deserve books on their own. The story of the murder still raises suspicions, as some believe that Muldowney’s mental instability had been exploited to once and for all silence an agent who knew too much about the inner workings of wartime intelligence. Amongst her many adventures she took the surrender of a German garrison persuading the polish conscripts there to join her; she tamed a man-hunting German soldier’s Alsatian dog which also switched sides under her spell and wouldn’t leave her side; perhaps most famously she marched into the Gestapo headquarters alone, despite the enormous bounty on her head and demanded the release of Francis Cammaerts and Xan Fielding who had been captured and were due to be executed that afternoon. Her father was Count Jerzy Skarbek, a Polish aristocrat, while her mother, Stefania Goldfeder, came from a Jewish banking background.

Speaking in Polish and revealing her identity, she talked to the 63 Polish soldiers - Volksdeutsche, i. Churchill recruited the young bride into Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), the first female British agent to serve in the field and the longest-serving of all Britain's wartime women agents. He pleaded for the sentence to be carried out as quickly as possible, so that he could ‘rejoin his beloved in the afterlife. Both she and Kowerski continued to be under suspicion by the British and resented by the Polish government-in-exile because they worked for Britain.Her charisma and charm seemed to captivate all who encountered her, earning her the admiration of countless men. However, due to being suspected of treason, she and Kowerski were not involved in any important espionage operations during that period. In January 1942, Stefania was arrested by the Germans as a Jew and disappeared into Warsaw's Pawiak prison. Unable to find work, Skarbek went to Nairobi, Kenya Colony to join Michael Dunford, an old lover, but the British colonial government turned down her application for a work permit. Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, OBE , GM ( Polish pronunciation: [krɨˈstɨna ˈskarbɛk], / k r ɪ s t iː n ə s k ɑːr b ɛ k/; 1 May 1908 [a] [b] [4] – 15 June 1952), also known as Christine Granville, [2] was a Polish agent of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War.