A woman in a million

Of all the extraordinary secret careers that have gone public since the end of the world war against Hitler, one of the most dashing and farthest out of the ordinary was that of the woman the SOE called Christine Granville. Her father, the Polish Count Jerzy Skarbek, died when she was a child; her mother was the daughter of a Jewish banker. Krystyna grew up an unmanageable tomboy. She had been born in 1915, and spent her babyhood under German occupation; that did not make her pro-German. She adored skiing and knew well most of the skiing instructors on the mountainous Hungarian border, with whose help she organised several astounding escapes from newly occupied Poland in the winter of 1939-40. She could not persuade her mother to come too; a countess’s rank was no help, her mother was murdered later in a concentration camp.

The Poles in exile, ever suspicious, could not believe she had managed these escapes without enemy help, and passed word round the secret world that she was unreliable. A friend in Cairo, where she turned up, reckoned he knew better, and provided her with a pittance out of SOE’s funds. She had spoken perfect French from childhood, learned to parachute, and was dropped into occupied France — indeed, into the Vercors — in the summer of 1944 to work with Francis Cammaerts, organising resistance east of the Rhone. Cammaerts was caught. She went and called on the prison that held him, explained — in no ladylike terms — what the allies did to captured Gestapo men, and bought him out with three million francs dropped in to her for the purpose.

At the end of the war the British gave her a George Medal, an OBE, £100 and a handshake.