The Gestapo was soon buzzing about “the White Mouse,” a woman who was helping hundreds of downed Allied servicemen and would-be political prisoners escape to England via Spain and the Pyrenees (which Wake claimed to have walked 17 times). Wake spread her husband’s wealth as far as she could, and inadvertently started running a sort of underground railway from her flat in Marseille. She was a horrendous driver, but very determined. Since France had almost no ambulances, she made him buy her one, according to Russell Braddon’s Nancy Wake: SEO’s Greatest Heroine.
She told her devoted husband, Henri, that she would become an ambulance driver.
However, when war came, Wake didn’t shy away. She married a wealthy man in Marseille, and was accustomed to breakfasting in a large bath with champagne and caviar on toast. They agreed.Īfter the war, Krystyna led a somewhat aimless existence, and was eventually stabbed to death by another obsessed admirer.įrom Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Imagesīorn in New Zealand in 1912 and raised in Australia, Nancy Wake’s life couldn’t have been sweeter. The Allies had just landed over the course of three hours, she convinced the guards that the only way they might receive mercy would be to release the prisoners. Now that she knew where he was located, she entered the prison and told the guards that she was related to a senior British diplomat. She once saved the life of one of her lovers, Francis Cammaerts, by skulking around the prison where he was being held and singing one of their favorite tunes, until she heard him sing it back. Krystyna became a vital part of the resistance, smuggling intelligence out of Poland to the allies, using her wits to evade capture and execution over and over again-including the time she bit her own tongue bloody to fake tuberculosis. Though her Jewish blood meant that she would never fully be accepted by the Polish aristocracy, Krystyna’s love for Poland never wavered. Krystyna craved danger, even as her very existence was perilous: her mother was a fabulously wealthy Jewish banking heir. It was the coldest winter in memory-German patrols found so many bodies in the following spring thaw that they doubled their patrols the following winter. She convinced the Olympic skier Jan Marusarz to escort her over the Tatras mountains from Hungary. Churchill made sure Donovan spent substantial time with Vera, according to Spymistress. Roosevelt sent his head of intelligence, William Donovan-the future creator of the C.I.A.-to scout the situation on the ground in Europe. Roosevelt, but it was well known the Americans were deeply against entering another world war-especially with Britain’s gloomy prospects.
Churchill had secretly been in contact with Franklin D. When Churchill was brought back to power to steel England against imminent German invasion, Vera was assigned to a high-ranking position in the Special Operations Executive, also known as “Churchill’s secret army.” In spite of the S.O.E.’s success, England still needed American support. In the years leading up to the war, she smuggled information to Churchill as he railed against Hitler’s regime in political exile-while the nervous English government tried to quiet him, believing Hitler’s promise not to invade.
Vera Atkins was Jewish (her real name was Rosenberg), a fact she didn't readily disclose to the high-ranking anti-Nazi bureaucrats she worked with.