Krystyna Skarbek

Origins and early life

Krystyna Skarbek, who served the British as Christine Granville, was born in Warsaw on 1 May 1908, the daughter of Count Jerzy Skarbek, an impoverished Polish Catholic aristocrat, and of Stefania Goldfeder, from an assimilated Jewish banking family of Warsaw; her maternal grandfather was the banker Adolf Goldfeder, and the family's records — her grandparents' 1859 marriage at the Warsaw synagogue, her mother's baptismal certificate of 15 November 1899 taken just before the wedding, the burials in the Okopowa Street Jewish cemetery — document the descent precisely.

Krystyna herself was raised Catholic; this fiche says so plainly, as it says that her mother was murdered during the German occupation, having refused to leave Warsaw or to hide.

Work and career

In December 1939 Krystyna talked her way into British intelligence in Budapest and began skiing over the Tatra mountains into occupied Poland with propaganda, money and messages, four crossings in the worst winter of the century, bringing out among other things the earliest microfilm evidence of German preparations to invade the Soviet Union, which reached Churchill. Arrested by the Gestapo in Hungary in 1941, she bit her tongue until it bled and coughed blood to feign tuberculosis, and was released.

She worked in Cairo, and in July 1944 parachuted into the Vercors in France as courier for the Jockey network, walked to the Italian border to persuade Polish conscripts in the German army to desert, and in August, when the Gestapo captured her network's leader Francis Cammaerts and two others three hours before their execution, she walked into the prison alone, told the Belgian liaison officer that she was General Montgomery's niece and that the Allies were at the gates, and bought their freedom with two million francs dropped that night by parachute.

She received the George Medal, the OBE and the Croix de guerre. Britain discarded her after the war; she worked as a ship's stewardess and was murdered in a London hotel on 15 June 1952 by a man whose advances she had refused.