Prominent Poles
Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek (pseudonym Christine Granville),WWII heroine; a Polish Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent who risked death on multiple occasions in support of Britain's military campaign. She became celebrated especially for her daring exploits in intelligence and irregular-warfare missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France. She was one of the longest-serving of all Britain's wartime women agents.
Born: May 1, 1908, Warsaw, Poland
Died: June 15, 1952, London, England
Comments. Skarbek, in the words of Murray Davies of London's Mirror newspaper, "was the very first Bond girl," serving as the model for Vesper Lynd in the first of novelist Ian Fleming's James Bond books, Casino Royale. However, Skarbek's feats, which included scaring off a team of German captors by raising her arms to disclose a live grenade under each one, were real, not fictional. British ambassador to Hungary, Sir Owen O'Malley, remarked that Skarbek was "the bravest person I ever knew. She could do anything with dynamite—except eat it." British prime minister Winston Churchill, dubbed Skarbek his favorite spy.
Early days. Father- Count Jerzy Skarbek (Habdank coat-of arms), a Catholic, mother- Stefania née Goldfeder, the daughter of a wealthy (her father was a banker) assimilated Jewish family. Marrying Stefania in late December 1899, Jerzy Skarbek used her dowry to pay his debts and continue his lavish life-style. Notable relations: Fryderyk Chopin, Chopin's godfather and prison reformer Fryderyk Skarbek, and United States Union General Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski. The couple's second child, Krystyna, took after her father and his liking for riding horses. She also became an expert skier during visits to Zakopane in the Tatra mountains of southern Poland. It was at the family stables that Krystyna first met Andrzej Kowerski. The 1920s left the family in straitened financial circumstances, and they had to give up their country estate and move to Warsaw.
Becoming independent. Described as physically stunning, Skarbek entered the Miss Polonia contest in 1930 and placed sixth. In 1930 Count Jerzy died. The Goldfeder financial empire had almost completely collapsed, and there was barely enough money to support the widowed Countess Stefania. Krystyna, not wishing to be a burden to her mother, took a job at a Fiat dealership but soon became ill from automobile fumes and had to give up the job. She received compensation from her employer's insurance company and took her physicians' advice to lead as much of an open-air life as she could. She began spending a great deal of time hiking and skiing the Tatra Mountains of southern Poland. Krystyna married a young businessman, Gustaw Gettlich; but they were incompatible, and the marriage soon ended without rancor. A subsequent love affair came to naught when the young man's mother refused to consider the penniless divorcée as a potential daughter-in-law. One day, on a Zakopane ski slope, Krystyna lost control and was saved by a giant of a man who stepped into her path and stopped her descent. Her rescuer was Jerzy Giżycki, a brilliant, moody, irascible eccentric, who came from a wealthy family in Ukraine. He eventually became an author and travelled the world in search of material for his books and articles. In 1938, Krystyna and Giżycki married at the Evangelical Reformed Church in Warsaw. Soon after, he accepted a diplomatic posting to Ethiopia, where he served as Poland’s consul general until September 1939.
London. Upon the outbreak of World War II, the couple sailed for London, England, where Skarbek sought to offer her services in the struggle against the common enemy. The British authorities showed little interest but were eventually convinced by Skarbek's acquaintances, including journalist Frederick Augustus Voigt, who introduced her to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
Hungary and Poland. Skarbek went to Hungary; and, in December 1939, she persuaded Polish Olympic skier Jan Marusarz to escort her across the snow-covered Tatra Mountains into Poland. Arriving in Warsaw, she vainly pleaded with her mother to leave Nazi-occupied Poland. Stefania Skarbek refused and died at the hands of the occupying Germans in Warsaw's Pawiak prison. Krystyna Skarbek helped organize a system of Polish couriers who brought intelligence reports from Warsaw to Budapest. In Hungary, Skarbek met a Polish army officer, Andrzej Kowerski. Kowerski, who had lost part of his leg in a pre-war hunting accident, was now exfiltrating Polish and other Allied military personnel and collecting intelligence. Skarbek and Kowerski were arrested by the Gestapo in January 1941; she won their release, feigning symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis by biting her tongue until it bled. Skarbek was then smuggled out of Hungary in the trunk of a Chrysler car belonging to Kowerski, who had been working in Hungary under the cover occupation of used car dealer (using pseudo Andrew Kennedy), followed in an Opel he claimed to have sold to someone across the border, and the two made their way through hundreds of miles of Nazi-occupied territory to SOE headquarters in Cairo, Egypt.
Cairo. Upon their arrival at SOE offices in Cairo, Egypt, they were shocked to learn they were under suspicion because of Skarbek's contacts with a Polish intelligence organization called the "Musketeers". Another source of suspicion was the ease with which she had obtained transit visas through French-mandated Syria and Lebanon from the pro-Vichy French consul in Istanbul. Only German spies, some Polish intelligence officers believed, could have obtained the visas. There were also specific suspicions about Kowerski. Kowerski eventually cleared up any misunderstandings with General Kopański and was able to resume intelligence work. Similarly, when Skarbek visited Polish military headquarters in her British Royal Air Force uniform, she was treated by the Polish military chiefs with the highest respect. It could not but have helped that, in the meantime, Germany had started the invasion of the Soviet Union (22 June 1941), as her intelligence obtained from the Musketeers had predicted. When Giżycki, was informed that Skarbek and Kowerski's services were being dispensed with, he took umbrage and abruptly bowed out of his own career as a British intelligence agent. When Skarbek told her husband that she loved Kowerski, Giżycki left for London, eventually emigrating to Canada. They would be formally divorced at the Polish consulate in Berlin in 1946. Skarbek was sidelined from mainstream action. Vera Atkins, assistant to the head of F Section, would later describe Skarbek as a very brave woman, but a law unto herself and a loner.
France. Skarbek's situation changed greatly in 1944. Fluent in French, she was offered to SOE's teams in France, under the nom de guerre "Madame Pauline". She was chosen to replace SOE agent Cecily Lefort, who had been captured, tortured, and imprisoned by the Gestapo. Skarbek, as "Pauline Armand", parachuted into southeastern France in July 1944 and became part of the "Jockey" network directed by a Belgian-British lapsed pacifist, Francis Cammaerts. She assisted Cammaerts by linking Italian partisans and French Maquis for joint operations against the Germans in the Alps and by inducing non-Germans, especially conscripted Poles, in the German occupation forces to defect to the Allies. On 13 August 1944, at Digne, two days before the Allied Operation Dragoon landings in southern France, Cammaerts, Xan Fielding—another SOE agent—and a French officer, Christian Sorensen, were arrested at a roadblock by the Gestapo. Skarbek, learning that they were to be executed, managed to meet with Capt. Albert Schenck, an Alsatian who acted as liaison officer between the local French prefecture and the Gestapo. She introduced herself as a niece of British General Bernard Montgomery and threatened Schenck with terrible retribution if harm came to the prisoners. She reinforced the threat with a mercenary appeal—an offer of two million francs for the men's release. Schenck in turn introduced her to a Gestapo officer, a Belgian named Max Waem. For three hours Christine argued and bargained with him and, having turned the full force of her magnetic personality on him... told him that the Allies would be arriving at any moment and that she, a British parachutist, was in constant wireless contact with the British forces. To make her point, she produced some broken... useless W/T crystals.... 'If I were you,' said Christine, ”I should give careful thought to the proposition I have made you. As I told Capitaine Schenck, if anything should happen to my husband [as she falsely described Cammaerts] or to his friends, the reprisals would be swift and terrible, for I don't have to tell you that both you and the Capitaine have an infamous reputation among the locals.” Increasingly alarmed by the thought of what might befall him when the Allies and the Resistance decided to avenge the many murders he had committed, Waem struck the butt end of his revolver on the table and said, 'If I do get them out of prison, what will you do to protect me?’After Cammaerts and the other two men were released, Captain Schenck was advised to leave Digne. He did not and was subsequently murdered by a person or persons unknown. His wife kept the bribe money.
Finale. Skarbek's service in France restored her political reputation and greatly enhanced her military reputation. When the SOE teams returned from France, some of the British women sought new missions in the Pacific War; but Skarbek, as a Pole, was ideally placed to serve as a courier for missions to her homeland in the final missions of SOE. As the Red Army advanced across Poland, the British government and Polish government-in-exile worked together to leave a network in place that would report on events in the People's Republic of Poland. Kowerski and Skarbek were now fully reconciled with the Polish forces and were preparing to be dropped into Poland in early 1945. In the event, the mission, called Operation Freston, was canceled because the first party to enter Poland was captured by the Red Army (they were released in February 1945). The women of SOE were all given military rank, with honorary commissions in either the Women's Transport Service (FANY), officially part of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) though a very elite and autonomous part, or the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Skarbek appears to have been a member of both. Skarbek was one of the few SOE female field agents promoted beyond subaltern rank to captain, or the Air Force equivalent: flight officer, the WAAF counterpart of the flight lieutenant rank for male officers. Skarbek, like Pearl Witherington, the courier who had taken command of a group when the designated commander was captured, and Yvonne Cormeau, the most successful wireless operator, ended the war as honorary flight officers.
Decorations. Skarbek's exploits at Digne were recognized with the award of the George Medal. For her work in conjunction with the British authorities, in May 1947 she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), an award normally associated with officers about the rank of colonel, and a rank above the "standard" award of Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) given to other women of SOE. French recognition of Skarbek's contribution to the liberation of France came with the award of the Croix de Guerre.
Postwar. After the war, Skarbek was left without financial reserves or a native country to return to. Xan Fielding, whom she had saved at Digne, wrote in his 1954 book, Hide and Seek, and dedicated "To the memory of Christine Granville": After the physical hardship and mental strain she had suffered for six years in our service, she needed, probably more than any other agent we had employed, security for life. […] Yet a few weeks after the armistice she was dismissed with a month's salary and left in Cairo to fend for herself ... [Alt]hough she was too proud to ask for any other assistance, she did apply for […] a British passport; for ever since the Anglo-American betrayal of her country at Yalta she had been virtually stateless. But the naturalization papers […] were delayed in the normal bureaucratic manner. Meanwhile, abandoning all hope of security, she deliberately embarked on a life of uncertain travel, as though anxious to reproduce in peace time the hazards she had known during the war; until, finally, in June 1952, in the lobby of a cheap London hotel, the menial existence to which she had been reduced by penury was ended by an assassin's knife.
Death. Christine Granville was stabbed to death in the Shelbourne Hotel, Earls Court, in London, England, on 15 June 1952. She had commenced work as a liner stewardess some six weeks earlier with the Union-Castle Line and had booked into the hotel on 14 June, having returned from a working voyage out of Durban, South Africa, on the Winchester Castle. Her body was identified by her cousin, Andrzej Skarbek. Her assailant was Dennis Muldowney, an obsessed Reform Club porter and former merchant marine steward whose advances she had previously rejected. After being tried and convicted of her murder, Muldowney was hanged on 30 September 1952. Christine Granville was interred in St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cemetery at Kensal Green in northwest London.
Popular culture. It has been said that Ian Fleming, in his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), modeled Vesper Lynd on her. According to William F. Nolan, Fleming also based Tatiana Romanova, in his 1957 novel From Russia, with Love, on Skarbek. Skarbek biographer Clare Mulley, however, states that "if Christine was immortalized as the carelessly beautiful double agent Vesper Lynd, Fleming is more likely to have been inspired by the stories he heard than the woman in person.... [H]e never claimed to have met her, even in passing.
Books There have been three published biographies of Skarbek:
Clare Mulley, The Spy Who Loved: the Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville, Britain's First Special Agent of World War II (2012).
References Marcus Binney, The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Women Agents of SOE in the Second World War, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 2002, ISBN 0 340 81840 9.
Xan Fielding, Hide and Seek: The Story of a War-Time Agent, London, Secker & Warburg, 1954.
Christopher Kasparek, "Krystyna Skarbek: Re-viewing Britain's Legendary Polish Agent", The Polish Review, vol. XLIX, no. 3 (2004), pp. 945–53.
Sources Abbreviated from an article in Wikipedia which was supplemented and modified:
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