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Welcome to the History Extra podcast.
Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine.
From sabotage operations to devastating betrayals.
Stories of the women of Special Operations Executive are some of the most incredible of the Second World War and, says Kate Vigors, some of the least known.
In her latest book, Mission Europe, Kate reveals the astonishing bravery of female agents operating in the Netherlands Belgium Denmark, Poland and the British mandate for Palestine, many of whom parachuted behind enemy lines.
She was speaking to Ellen Evans.
Kate, thank you so much for joining the History Extra podcast.
How are you doing today?
I'm really good.
Thank you very much for having me.
It's wonderful that you're back.
And we last spoke in 2021 about your book, Mission France, which looked at women of the F section of SOE predominantly.
We're today talking about Mission Europe.
What drove you to expand this storytelling?
Bring listeners into the scope of this new book.
So with Mission France I covered the 39 women who were part of SOE's F section, which was the independent French section.
And in that book I was very keen that agents who weren't well-known were brought out of the footnotes.
And so the footnotes this time seemed to be made up of people in other countries.
And I thought, well, it's their chance to be in the spotlight now.
For various reasons, we really focus on F-section when we discuss SOE.
I think even when resistance is mentioned, people's minds will immediately go to the French resistance.
And I thought, you know what?
It's time to talk about the other ladies.
So I started to dig around see if it was feasible, and discovered women in the Netherlands, in Belgium Denmark, and even some women who had emigrated from Eastern Europe into Mandate Palestine who were given the opportunity to parachute back.
And their stories were just so, so interesting.
I decided to see if I could write a book on it.
And I have.
Here it is.
So these women are finally getting their time in the spotlight.
Now, I'm not going to lie.
There are two chapters about France in there, but it's not about F section.
It's about the Republic Francaise.
It's about de Gaulle's sections which have been absolutely fascinating to research and to meet some of these women today.
You end up living with them when you're writing about them and to sort of get to know them in the same way I got to know the F section agents.
Yes, the stories really are remarkable.
I can confirm that having dug into your excellent book.
And it almost feels a bit unfair to be talking about them in this sort of 30 minute podcast as a cohort, because their stories are so varied and they're such individuals coming off the page.
It's really wonderful.
Before we do dig into some of the individual stories.
We've got another episode on SOE, everything you want to know about on this channel.
So, just for the purposes of this episode, can you briefly remind listeners what is SOE and what is its place in the picture of broader resistance in occupied Europe?
So SOE is Special Operations Executive.
It was formed in July of 1940, really after the fall of France and the Low Countries.
The idea was to bolster resistance from within.
It was sabotage and subversion.
So essentially, they're not spies.
They are secret agents.
There is intelligence gathering going on, but it's not the main remit.
The main remit is to slow down the German war effort by means of sabotage, be that industrial or propaganda, just to stop them in their tracks.
So the way that SOE fits into the broader intelligence picture.
There is the Secret Intelligence Service, who are also doing similar work their intelligence gathering.
And SOE provided funds, weapons and personnel to help the resistance in occupied territories.
So we can hear already that it is a really varied picture of the work that these women were doing.
Again, we're talking about a huge number of individuals here, but can you give us some stories of how some of these women came to be involved?
What were sort of some stories of how they got recruited into this operation?
So for a lot of them they had fled their countries when they were occupied, or they'd undertaken resistance work in their national country and then left found their way back to England.
So I'll take Trix Terwint as an example, who was from the Netherlands.
She was actually a KLM stewardess.
She was one of the first air stewardesses ever.
Had quite a high flying life, if you'll pardon the pun, you know really had a wonderful career.
But when war came, commercial flights were grounded.
So KLM stopped flying.
They gave Trix a job working in a refugee office for the people who'd been bombed out of their homes during the destruction of Rotterdam.
And when all that was over, I imagine she was quite stressed, actually.
She'd been through quite a lot.
And she went to live the life of a recluse.
I talk about her milking her goat and going fishing and living in a little shack on the side of a lake.
You know, she really took herself away from it.
But then one of her colleagues, a man called Klaas Wouter from KLM, approached her and said would you like to help us set up an escape line getting downed Allied airmen out of the Netherlands?
She said yes.
And, to cut a very long story short, she ends up coming to the UK when she goes for her MI5 clearance.
So any foreign national coming into Britain had to be screened obviously, to make sure they weren't spies or that they weren't working for the Germans.
They said she was a plucky little patriot and she should be assigned to work to go back into the Netherlands.
So she then ends up working there. for MI9, which is actually escape and evasion.
But she has SOE training and SOE are going to look after her for the first few hours days of her mission when she lands.
So she ends up being parachuted in.
I won't give too much away because she gets tied up in one of the biggest disasters that SOE encountered.
Yes, well, we might return to Trix's story in a little bit without giving away what happens to her.
In contrast.
Then, looking at another woman's story you mentioned Trix living a quiet life by a lake, cooking fish for her supper that she'd caught that day.
In contrast, someone we might position against that is Elspieta Zawaka, who is already in this mix.
She's sort of deploying herself, if you like, into these zones of conflict.
What can you tell us about Elspieta's story?
So Elspiata Zawaska is Polish.
When she was studying she encountered an organization training women, sort of for the eventuality of war, just just in case it was going to happen again.
Physical training and getting them mentally and physically prepared.
She excelled in that so much she became an instructor.
And when war did eventually break out.
When Germany invaded Poland September 1939, these people were there.
They were ready and they were prepared.
I think there's a little bit of... a misunderstanding about Poland that they weren't expecting war.
But the story of Elsbieta and the other women.
She was working with another woman, Maria Witek, who was in charge of this organisation.
They were fully prepared and they did do their best to fight back.
But the September campaign failed.
Poland was split into pieces, really.
Part of it goes into the Third Reich.
Part of it goes to Russia and the central part becomes occupied the general government.
And Zavaska becomes a courier and she's taking information all over Europe.
And one of the best bits of my research, I must say, is I went to her archive and museum and they opened a cabinet and they put a key in my hand.
And this is the key in which she hid the microfilms that she then took across the borders to get them and get the information back to the Allies.
And that was just holding a piece of history that meant so much to me personally was unbelievable.
And eventually she's given a job to come back to England.
The job is twofold.
One is to deliver a report to the Polish government in exile in London.
And the second one is to try and get women recognition, to get them back recognized by their rank, because they were highly educated women working within all of these organizations in Poland and they had no authority.
It's a long story.
It takes four attempts to get to London, but she does it.
A bit of a spoiler alert.
She doesn't deliver the report.
She gave it to somebody else because he.
There was one place on an aircraft and they gave it to the man.
Of course they did.
So she gave him the report and he took it to London for her.
But she trains.
And not only does she train, she does the training because she has immediate knowledge of life under the occupation in Poland.
So she is instructing the agents, or Czikociemni as they were known, the silent unseen, what life was going to be like when they went back to Poland, the general government or wherever they were parachuting in.
So yeah she, she throws herself into the fray.
She really does.
Well, let's stay on the training then, because Elspieta is the only woman in that program.
What is training like for women going alongside this man?
Is it any different?
How are they perceived in this sort of training section, and what are the perception of the men towards them?
So I did a lot of research on this while I was doing my PhD, because one of the things I wanted to know was were women treated equally to men?
And the answer is a universal yes.
They were, because when they were in the field, they would be dealing with the same terrain, the same enemy, the same problems as the men would be facing.
So they did have the same training.
Now, what we find in Mission Europe as opposed to Mission France is the training varies because of the experience that some of the women are bringing with them.
So let's go back to Elspieta for a moment.
She is already a very experienced courier and she actually only needs training to get back into Poland.
She's not going to be on an SOE mission.
So she only requires, and I say only because I wouldn't do it, parachute training.
She needs to learn to jump because that's how they're going to get her back into Poland.
So that's what she receives.
Some of the other agents.
We find they get far more comprehensive training because they are literally civilians who have been chosen for a variety of reasons language skills perhaps, or their local knowledge.
So they would start off with a preliminary training course.
This was usually to weed out unsuitable agents.
So you don't find this so much in Mission Europe, because these women have already been selected because of the knowledge they hold.
It's likely they're going to be infiltrated into the field.
Paramilitary training is the big one.
That's up on the west coast of Scotland, where I've been spending a lot of time recently.
And it's brutal up there.
It's mountainous.
It rains.
It snows.
It's windy.
And...
The idea was you would learn how to live off the land.
You'd learn the really hard parts of life in the resistance.
They also had explosives training and things like that, which really comes to the fore with several of the women that I discuss and talk about.
Parachute training, nearly all of them went through parachute training.
I do have an example of one woman who was so terrified.
She didn't train in Europe.
She trained in Mandate Palestine and her parachute training was in Algiers.
She just couldn't do it.
She just could not jump.
But they said, it's OK, we're still going to infiltrate you.
We'll just find another way.
And then they all had a finishing school at Bewley in the New Forest as well, where they sort of put the finishing touches to their cover stories.
But it's not as prescribed as I once believed it was.
Agents really were given what they needed to get them into the field.
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Once they're in the field, then staying on this idea of equality, if that's the right word.
How were they perceived by their peers?
What did you find out about how they worked with the men and the units that they were sort of working in?
So...
They did get training reports and they're always by male instructors.
And you do find they can be quite derogatory.
I don't think this is blatant sexism though, because you find derogatory comments in the men's reports as well.
A lot of the male instructors said after the war, we just didn't want to send them.
It's as simple as that.
We knew what they were going into.
We didn't want to send them.
However, the women that feature in Mission Europe nearly universally get positive training reports.
They're ready to get them in.
Now, when they arrive in the field, I'll take Jeanne Boeck as my example here.
She worked for de Gaulle's section, RF, the Republic Francaise.
Her codename was Rato.
She lands in the field to a reception committee and they come up to her and say, but you're a woman.
We don't want a woman.
We want a man.
We want a man who's going to teach us how to blow stuff up.
And she says, no one told them Rato was a woman.
And she kind of went, well, off from here, you're going to have to get on with it.
And she is remarkable because she's the only female explosive instructor that I've found yet.
Research is always ongoing.
She was described as a tomboy.
She liked to rough and tumble with the lads, as they say in her training report.
And she went out and she taught the local resistance how to make homemade explosives or how to use the equipment that SOE were providing.
Her use of language around all of this is it's wonderful.
You know, I had the detonators.
I had the Bickford cord, but I didn't have such and such.
And I went and made it myself using an aspirin tube.
She's brilliant.
And all I seem to pick up is absolute respect from the men that she is instructing.
All admire her and they're all prepared to follow her to the ends of the earth, because she knows what she's talking about.
And in fact she does a prototype sabotage ahead of D-Day, which allows the major sabotage operations then to happen.
So she's absolutely admired by the men.
And we find this most of the way through it.
The only point where I find the blatant Sexism is in Zavaska's story where she goes to London to say women should be given equal ranking as men, and she succeeds.
So there's a definite shift towards being treated the same as men.
Yes, a definite shift.
And just on Boak's story, I love the vision of her going around and blowing up train lines and ahead of D-Day, obviously again such crucial work.
You did allude to that, that these stories are still being, you know, found and unearthed.
And obviously you tell so many in this book.
But there are challenges, aren't there, of how you get to this information.
Can you speak to some of those challenges of gaining records around SOE and these women's stories in particular?
Yes.
So the starting point for most of us would be the National Archives.
And in there we find most of the personnel files for SOE.
It's well known, I believe, that SOE destroyed a lot of their files after the war.
There have always been approximations of the percentage of that.
It stands at around 85 percent of the files were destroyed.
So that makes it difficult.
And then there was a fire, just to add insult to injury, at the archive in Baker Street before they moved.
So we are dealing with a much smaller amount of information than there originally was.
But that's not to say that this information was necessarily worth having.
You know, it could just be appointments diaries or, you know, memos backwards and forwards.
We don't know what's been lost.
I've been very, very fortunate with Mission Europe that I received funding from the Jerry Holdsworth Special Forces Trust, which enabled me to travel around Europe.
And, you know, I'm not going to lie.
I have had a wonderful time researching this book.
I have accessed places and archives that I never dreamed I would get to.
So I went to the prison where Hannah Sinesh was held, for example.
It's closed to the public, but I was allowed to get access.
I visited archives in Copenhagen, in Warsaw, in Torren, in the Netherlands.
There I found a letter I'd been looking for for a year.
I danced a jig around the archives when I found it.
So I've been very lucky that I have travelled.
And basically what you do is photograph everything.
I don't speak Dutch.
I don't speak Hungarian.
You photograph everything and then get at home and start to work it out.
So it's a massive challenge, but it's one that I've really embraced to this time and really enjoyed.
I think that really comes across in the book.
It's really wonderful to read.
To turn to someone else in your account, you mentioned Hannah Sonesh there.
I wonder if we can pick up on her work.
She was one of the women who was recruited in Mandate Palestine and came to resistance work through there.
Can you go into her story?
So Hannah Sonesh was born in Budapest.
She was Jewish, but her family weren't particularly religious.
When she was at school, she began to encounter anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism was rife across Europe pre-war.
But she decided she wanted to dig down into her Jewish roots.
She wanted to explore what it was all about.
And she joined the Zionist youth movement, which was particularly good for her because she began to find her identity as a Jewish woman.
And there was a big move in the 30s for people to emigrate to mandate Palestine.
They would train at agricultural schools and then go on to work in kibbutz.
So that's what she decided she was going to do.
She emigrated very successfully.
She graduated from the Nalahal Agricultural School and went to work at the Sadat Yam Kibbutz in Mandate Palestine.
What's so wonderful about Hannah was she kept diaries and her letters.
So we have a very vivid account of her time in Mandate, Palestine.
However, war breaks out and she is asked if she'd like to join the, the Jewish fighting organization called the Palmach.
They are essentially training up men and women to be parachuted back into Europe Eastern Europe in this instance.
She would go back into Hungary.
The role would be to help any allies who were caught there, to try and get them out.
That was the British mission.
The Jewish part of the mission is what blows me away.
They wanted to help the jews of europe.
They knew about the deportations, they knew about the anti-semitism, about the anti-jewish laws and sentiments, because they'd seen it growing.
They knew what was going on.
So they have this sort of private mission that they're going to try and help.
So hannah trains.
She loves parachuting.
She gives some beautiful accounts of uh, the sunset as she's jumping.
All this stuff.
Just as she's about to leave on her mission, she has a surprise visitor, which is her brother, who has now emigrated to Mandate Palestine.
And the timing is beautiful.
He arrives on the day that she's due to be dispatched to prepare for her mission.
So they postpone it by a day.
She spends the afternoon with her brother.
She can't tell him what she's doing, but there's a really beautiful account of the two of them together.
And then she leaves and he doesn't know where she's gone or what she's doing.
She parachutes into Yugoslavia.
She works with Tito's partisans for three months, desperately trying to get into Hungary.
But Hungary is now at the point of being occupied.
Eventually, she goes.
She leaves her uniform behind, which is quite tragic, because things may have gone a different way had she been uniformed.
And she takes her wireless set.
And it's not just a case of walking over the border.
She swims across a river with bits of a wireless set and then swims back and gets more.
And what?
It's just incredible.
She does this.
Unfortunately, it's a series of circumstances that lead up to it.
She's arrested.
She's taken to prison.
She's brutalized.
Her mother is brought to the prison.
They say to her, where's your daughter?
And she say, she's in Mandate Palestine.
You know, she's safe.
And then Hannah's walked through the door, missing teeth, bruised, hair ripped out.
And Catherine, her mother, is just beside herself.
They're kept in the same prison together, but it's a special kind of torture because they're kept apart.
And eventually, Hannah is put in front of a military tribunal.
She's accused of being a spy against her own country.
And it's the Hungarian authorities who sentenced her to death.
And unfortunately, the death sentence was fulfilled.
And at the age of 23, Hannah Sinesh met her death.
And it's just such a tragic story.
And what I love about her is one of the things she said, she knew that the mission was bonkers.
But she said, if the news reaches just one Jew that someone tried to help them, then I've succeeded in my mission.
Hannah's story is so remarkable and has really stayed with me for her years immense bravery and also the really moving element of the familial story around it as well.
Before we go into more broadly how some of these women are remembered for their bravery, can we stay on the family element?
Because I think there seems to be a considering the fates of their families and wanting to return to them when they were parachuting back into, you know, homes or other places.
They were always mindful of parents' fates or siblings' fates or people they knew.
Is that a fair sort of thread to find through your book?
Yeah, absolutely.
Going back to Jeanne Bewek when she goes back into France, the first thing she wants to do is see her parents.
And she goes home and she says, I'm safe.
I'm OK, because I hadn't seen her since she'd evacuated out.
And her father says, well, you're here now.
You're safe.
You know, you're home.
And she says, no, no, no, no.
There's a war to be fought.
I will see you after the war.
And she takes her bicycle, which becomes a trademark.
And she goes.
There's another woman who was starting her underground activities while still living at home.
And she realized she couldn't do it.
She couldn't risk her parents' lives.
So she moved into a hotel so that they wouldn't be implicated.
They wouldn't know what she was doing.
Yeah, there's a very, very strong family link through most of these stories, as they're very aware of what could happen to their families if they were caught up in all of it.
Yes, and obviously myself drawing that parallel, that's not because they were women.
Obviously, it's a universal impulse, I believe, to care about one's family and friends and things.
But I think it just struck me because perhaps what they were expected of in society and the way they could move around in society,
It just seemed so brave the way that they were stepping out of these family units into unknown situations.
Yeah, completely.
And also they're young.
That's one of the reasons to go back to family as well.
You're talking about women in their very early 20s, some of whom haven't seen their family because they made the decision to leave family.
France, Belgium, the Netherlands during the occupation and they're coming back.
And the first thing you're going to want to do, no matter who you are, is find out how your family is.
Visiting them isn't necessarily the best idea if you've just parachuted in.
However, we're all human beings and those family ties are very, very important to these people.
Absolutely.
And I mean while it wasn't without huge risk, they were obviously doing really important work as well.
You've mentioned that Some intelligence, just because of the nature of the risks and the operations, didn't get to the right hands eventually.
Are there any examples here of where this intelligence does make it and a woman is recognised for?
You know such work in a mission of intelligence gathering, or you know delivering messages, that sort of thing.
I think one of the main ones and she was in Mission France as well is Christina Skarbek, or Christine Granville, who said basically takes evidence of Operation Barbarossa over the mountains, rewarded with confidence really, that her work is worth it and successful.
But yeah, we do get instances of this intelligence being terribly important.
So Barbarossa is a big one of those.
The work that Boak does ahead of D-Day is also exceptionally important.
It's not intelligence, it's sabotage.
But nonetheless, it's sowing the seeds for what's to come.
So, yeah, you do find instances of these women being incredibly successful in their work.
And is that recognised at the time or does it take a little while after the war?
Sometimes it is recognised at the time.
She's not in this particular book, but Virginia Hall is decorated during the war, for example for her work.
I think it takes time afterwards.
There's a war to be fought.
There are things to be done.
And I think it's worth bearing in mind these women are civilian.
They are not uniformed.
Therefore, they're not going to be in the male uniform scheme of, of decoration i'm trying to think of the correct word.
There's a protocol uh, if you're in the army, the navy, the air force, which you're not going to find in secret services like sa wheel, the secret intelligence service.
So yeah, it does take a while for recognition and some of these women, they just don't want it.
They want to go back to their normal everyday lives.
The war is over.
They've done their bit.
Let's crack on.
I mean tricks, for example.
Um, She goes straight back and starts being an air stewardess again because she loved it.
And it's like the war was just a bit of a blip.
There's a lot for her to deal with and unpack.
But she does go back to her pre-war existence as best as she can anyway.
How much is known about what these women do next, given the secrecy around perhaps, what they were doing and the civilian nature of their status?
Can you track them much beyond what they were doing in the war?
You can with some of them.
So someone like Trix, for example, wrote a lot of letters.
So Trix was incarcerated in several concentration camps.
The letter I mentioned earlier that I finally found in the Netherlands talks about her receiving LSD treatment to try and help her process what she'd been through.
So she wrote a series of letters to the head of MI9, Airy Neve, and vice versa.
These were all kept.
Another historian found them and she put me onto them.
She said, there's a suitcase load of stuff, you know, you want to go read it.
So in some instances, yes, we can find out what they did.
A lot of them didn't talk about it.
Elaine Madden, for example, she's one of the Belgian agents.
Wonderful lady called Sue Elliott did a lot of work with Elaine while she was still alive.
So she's been on a couple of documentaries.
There was nine hours of interview material that I was allowed access to.
So for some of them, yes, you can trace it.
And then you have someone like Sarika Braverman, who's one of the ones from Mandate Palestine.
And she says, I was with the partisans for a month.
I didn't do much.
You were with the partisans for a month.
They're so self-effacing.
They're so self-effacing.
It's just, yeah, I just did my job.
Wow.
OK, if that's just a job, then all credit to you.
Yes.
I mean reading it.
You can't help but just think.
You know.
It puts you in the position of what would you do in these women's positions?
And I can honestly say I can't say I would be able to emulate them in any way, because it's just staggering.
But I think this point that they were ordinary women in their own eyes, doing ordinary work, is a really powerful one.
And I guess, how are they?
Are they remembered in their various nations or nationally?
Or do they have such status today, 80 years after the war's end?
Some of them do.
Some of them do.
Hannah Sonesh is incredibly well known.
There's a kibbutz named after her that she has a museum.
Her body was exhumed and buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery in Jerusalem.
So she is well known.
And I test the waters every now and again and say, have you heard of Hannah Sonesh?
And within her own nation, very much so.
I'm trying to get her recognized a bit more in Hungary.
She was Hungarian.
She went back to Hungary.
She deserves a bit more recognition there.
Somebody a name I haven't mentioned in the podcast, but in the book, Jos Hamica spoke very widely after the war about what she was up to.
So her name is well known in the Netherlands.
But people like the Republic Francaise section, they just seem to, they seem to disappear almost from public memory.
I talk about this quite a lot in the book, why we remember F section over something like RF section.
And of course, de Gaulle is a bit of a prickly one.
Some people love him.
Some people hate him.
And it could be that's the reason.
And it's hard to say why some are well known and some aren't.
But I've fought for it.
I'm trying to make sure that their names are out there now.
Yes.
And as you say, this history is evolving.
It's live and new stories are being told every day.
Your book is obviously a huge step forward in many of these stories being made known to a wider audience.
And Kate, thank you so much for talking to us about Mission Europe today.
Are there any other stories or thoughts you'd like to leave our listeners with as we wrap up the conversation?
I think for me, it's the humanity.
They're not all brilliant.
They're not all amazing.
They're not all heroines.
They are people.
They make mistakes.
They do things wrong. for themselves.
And that's what I love about studying this is the humanity, the stories, the empathy we can maybe find with some of these amazing women ordinary women, as I say who did extraordinary things.
That was historian and author Kate Vigors speaking to Eleanor Evans.
Kate's latest book, Mission Europe, The Secret History of the Women of SOE, is out now.
You can hear more from Kate in a Life of the Week episode that she recorded with us on the extraordinary life of the Second World War spy Noor Inyat Khan.
And you can find that in this podcast feed.
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