100 Nasty Women of History

by Hannah Jewell

  The three escapees were offered a declaration to sign that would promise their captors they would not try to escape again. One did sign it, and survived the war to tell the story of what had happened at Avenue Foch. But Noor did not, and was sent to Pforzheim prison, classified as a highly dangerous detainee, kept in isolation, tied in chains, and given only the lowest rations to eat. She was the first British agent sent to Germany during the war. Despite her total isolation, Noor passed messages with a group of French political prisoners in Pforzheim prison by scratching short communications onto the prison’s food bowls, which would take a few days to circulate round the prisoners before reaching the correct person. The women kept each other’s spirits up by scratching overheard news of Allied victories.

  Noor passed her contact information in this way to one of the French women, Yolande. It was thanks to this, and Yolande’s efforts to track her down after the war, that we know what happened to her in the end: Noor was transported from Pforzheim to Dachau concentration camp in September 1944, where she was beaten, shot, and cremated. As Germany began to realise its impending loss in the war, Himmler had given an order to kill all captured secret agents because they knew too much about the Nazis. Just seven months after Noor died, the Allies liberated the camp. It wasn’t until two years after the war’s end that her former colleagues and her family discovered her fate.

  Sixteen women agents of the French SOE section died in the war. President Eisenhower said that the SOE’s work shortened the war by six months. Noor was awarded medals for her bravery by the French and the British, who noted her insistence on staying in Paris under grave danger, the many lives she saved through her work, and the fact that she didn’t betray anyone under extreme pressure while imprisoned and tortured. Today, there is a statue of Noor in Russell Square in London. In the springtime, it’s surrounded by little purple crocus flowers.

  89

  Nancy Wake

  1912–2011

  You’ve already heard a bit about the SOE, since you’re reading this book straight through in one sitting, as books ought to be read. If you aren’t, you’re a terrible person, but here’s the tl;dr: the Special Operations Executive was a spy agency set up by Winston Churchill, British prime minister famous for leading Britain through WWII and being a bit of a prick, with the aim of ‘setting Europe ablaze’ through sabotage and other secret spying things.

  Men and women SOE agents were the stuff of James Bond films, though everyone knows that it would be impossible nowadays to cast a female James Bond, because if women appear in an action film for longer than it takes to whip their tops off, they become terribly ill and die. Best not to risk it.

  Anyway. Nancy Wake was born in 1912 at Roseneath, in Wellington, New Zealand, but moved to Australia and grew up in the Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay, a place known to be very neutral. Nancy was a rebellious teen, as teens are wont to be, and ran away at 16 to work as a nurse and support herself under a made-up name, which in retrospect was a pretty spy-y thing to do. In 1932, she left Australia and ended up training as a journalist in London, before moving to Paris and getting a job and a hot French husband, Henri. She was living the dream, but then the war began and fucked up her life, along with everyone else’s.

  Nancy and Henri immediately went to work assisting the French Resistance after France’s invasion by Germany in 1940. Nancy worked as a courier and a guide for as many as 1,000 Allied airmen seeking to escape via the Pyrenees mountain range into neutral Spain. The Gestapo was aware of her activities but could not track her down. They called her ‘White Mouse’. She was impossible to catch, often flirting her way past guards, as she explained in an interview with the Australian News in 2011, just before she died:

  ‘I’d see a German officer on the train or somewhere, sometimes dressed in civvies, but you could pick ’em. So, instead of raising suspicions I’d flirt with them, ask for a light and say my lighter was out of fuel … A little powder and a little drink on the way, and I’d pass their posts and wink and say, “Do you want to search me?” God, what a flirtatious little bastard I was.’

  In 1942, with the German occupation of southern (Vichy) France and her resistance network betrayed, not to mention a five-million-franc reward on her head, things got too dangerous and Nancy escaped on foot over the Pyrenees and from there to England. Her husband stayed behind – and was captured and killed by the Germans the next year. He had refused to reveal anything to them about who Nancy was or where they could find her. She would not discover his fate until the end of the war.

  Once in England, Nancy was not finished fighting the Germans. She joined the SOE and impressed her instructors with her wide set of spy skills. One instructor noted that ‘she enjoys life in her own way, drinks and swears like a trooper.’ Vera Atkins, the intelligence officer organising the French section of the SOE from London, described her as ‘a real Australian bombshell. Tremendous vitality, flashing eyes.’

  Ready for action, Nancy parachuted into France at the end of April 1944. As Nancy liked to tell the story, her parachute got stuck in a tree, and some smug Frenchman meant to receive her party made a remark about how he wished all trees bore such beautiful fruit. She replied with her trademark charm, ‘Don’t give me that French shit.’ Listen up, gentlemen of the world! Don’t give ladies that French shit unless it has been explicitly requested.

  Nancy’s job in France was to assist a spy network and resistance forces in the mountainous Auvergne region in the centre of the country. Nancy’s war exploits were frankly ridiculous. Not only did she directly participate in battles, but she recruited 3,000 ‘Maquis’ guerrilla soldiers to join the resistance, eventually leading 7,000 fighters who worked to sabotage and distract German forces in the lead-up to the 1944 invasion of Normandy on D-Day.

  Once, while attacking an arms factory, Nancy murdered a German soldier with her bare hands: ‘They’d taught this judo-chop stuff with the flat of the hand at SOE, and I practised away at it. But this was the only time I used it – whack – and it killed him all right. I was really surprised.’

  I mean you would be surprised, wouldn’t you?

  When Nancy returned to England, the governments of France, Britain and New Zealand threw medals at her. She married again and moved to Australia, where she unsuccessfully ran for parliament a few times as a candidate for the Liberal party.

  Nancy spent her last decade living at the Stafford Hotel in Piccadilly, London, where she drank gin and tonics and told war stories to any and all who would listen. Once her money ran out, Prince Charles picked up the bill, because no one wants to be the jerk to kick a 98-year-old woman out of a hotel bar, let alone the most decorated woman war hero of WWII. Not only would it be rude, but also, Nancy once successfully killed a man with a single judo chop.

  90

  Dorothy Thompson

  1893–1961

  The American journalist Dorothy Thompson was the first foreign correspondent to be kicked out of Nazi Germany, in 1934, because she’d offended Hitler with her reporting. In 1931 she had been the first foreign journalist to interview him, and he probably didn’t like this description:

  He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. A lock of lank hair falls over an insignificant and slightly retreating forehead … The nose is large, but badly shaped and without character. His movements are awkward, almost undignified and most un-martial … The eyes alone are notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroid – they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.

  He had told her in the interview how he planned to come to power: ‘I will get into power legally. I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.’r />
  She did not believe he could do it: ‘Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,’ she wrote. When Hitler came to power the next year, she admitted she had made a grave error of judgement and set about reporting on his early years in power with her forthright style until she was at last expelled from Germany. One book critic, who doesn’t matter, complained how in her writing, Dorothy’s ‘emotions gain the upper hand over her logical reasoning,’ the most male-critic thing ever said. If you can’t be emotional about 1930s Germany, what can you be emotional about?

  When she returned to the US, Dorothy only stepped up her criticisms and warnings about the unprecedented danger posed by Hitler. She wrote a thrice-weekly column for the New York Tribune read by millions and was a radio presenter for NBC, and broadcasted anti-Hitler propaganda directly to Germany that was later compiled into a book called Listen, Hans. In 1939, Time magazine called her the most influential American woman after only Eleanor Roosevelt thanks to her compelling style, prolific output, and enormous following. ‘Dorothy Thompson is the US clubwoman’s woman,’ the magazine said. ‘She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them from Walter Lippmann.’ The Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, meanwhile, called her ‘the scum of America’.

  In 1935, Dorothy imagined what it would look like if and when a dictator came to power in the United States. Here’s what she said, as quoted in a 2006 book by Helen Thomas, Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How it Has Failed the Public:

  No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will … When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say ‘Heil’ to him, nor will they call him ‘Führer’ or ‘Duce’. But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘OK, Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!’

  91

  Irena Sendler

  1910–2008

  Irena Sendler did not want to be remembered as a hero. ‘Heroes do extraordinary things,’ she said in her old age. ‘What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal.’ What Irena did was save at least 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II Poland. Was this normal?

  On the one hand, no. It wasn’t. Ninety per cent of Poland’s Jews were killed over the course of the war. Fifteen per cent of Poland’s entire population died in these years. The penalty for helping a Jewish person was instant death, for you and also for your family. Only about 5,000 out of one million Polish Jewish children survived the war. Irena and the network that she cultivated saved thousands of these children. For six years Irena Sendler woke up each morning and made a choice to risk her life on behalf of others. So, sorry, Irena, if you look at the numbers, that’s not normal, that’s pretty heroic.

  On the other hand, it should be normal, right? It should be ‘normal’ to want to save lives, to use what privileges you have in order to help the victims of unimaginable horrors. Was it normal for Warsaw residents to enjoy an Easter carnival in 1943 so close to the walls of the Ghetto that they could see, safely from the top of the ferris wheel, the German forces crushing the Jewish uprising within? That’s what shouldn’t be normal.

  We won’t call Irena a hero, in any case, because the term bothered her. ‘Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes,’ she said. ‘Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true – I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little.’

  Perhaps this is just the mindset of the social worker, and Irena was, by trade, a social worker. She was born in 1910 to a father who had been the same way, a civic-minded doctor happy to treat Jewish patients in a time when most Catholic doctors wouldn’t. Because of this, Irena grew up enmeshed in the Jewish community of the village of Otwock, speaking Yiddish with her friends though she herself was Catholic.

  Irena attended Warsaw University, and wanted to become a lawyer, but was discouraged from pursuing this unfeminine profession by her department, so studied literature and became a teacher instead. She found her true calling, however, when she went to train as a social worker at the Polish Free University. It was here in the early 1930s that Irena built a close-knit friendship circle under their professor, Dr Helena Radlinska, that would form the backbone of her future resistance network. In the years Irena was at university, the Polish far right grew ever more emboldened, beating people on campus and forcing Jewish students to sit apart from their classmates at lectures. But things were about to get worse.

  Hitler’s forces invaded Poland in September 1939, and within the first year of the occupation of Warsaw, Irena and her circle of social worker friends had set up an underground network to illegally provide social services to Jewish families by forging paperwork and funnelling food, money and clothing to them.

  In early 1941, when Warsaw’s Jews were forced to move into the 73 rundown streets that would comprise the walled-in Warsaw Ghetto, Irena and her network were ready to assist once more. Jewish refugees from across German-occupied territory were sent to the Ghetto, and the enclosed area would at its peak contain over 400,000 people. Families crowded into single rooms, suffered from poverty and disease, and subsisted at first on rations of 184 calories per person per day.

  As a social worker, Irena was able to obtain a pass to allow her in and out of the Ghetto on the premise of helping to control epidemics and prevent their spread outside its walls. Irena could not look away from the agony of those inside. ‘I knew the suffering of the people rotting away behind the walls, and I wanted to help my old friends,’ she later said. These Jewish friends included her boyfriend, Adam, and other classmates from the Polish Free University including Ala Golab-Gryberg, who became the chief nurse of the Warsaw ghetto.

  As the situation became more dire inside the Ghetto – and the consequences for helping Jewish people more severe – Irena expanded her operations to provide whatever social services she could to its inhabitants. Passing through the German-controlled checkpoints, she smuggled food, dolls for children, and typhoid vaccinations, sometimes in her bra. (It’s a recurring theme among women who resisted Nazis – hiding forbidden information or materials inside their bras. Bras may be uncomfortable, but they’ve served anti-fascist purposes in the past.)

  Irena’s office also handled blank copies of the documents such as birth certificates that Jewish families would need to escape the Ghetto and the Germans under false, non-Jewish identities. In the summer of 1942, the Germans began the process of deporting the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp, though they said the train carriages would merely take them somewhere else to be ‘relocated’. Terrified parents inside the Ghetto increasingly made the heartbreaking decision to part with their young children, entrusting them to the care of Irena and her network, who would smuggle them out and place them in hiding under new identities with forged documents.

  Meanwhile Irena’s friend Ala saved hundreds of people from deportation by pretending to have permission to set up a medical clinic at Umschlagplatz, the square in the Ghetto from where the trains departed. She played along with the German ruse that the deportation was merely a resettlement, insisting to them that some were too ill or sick to travel. Of course the Germans did not care who was too ill – but for a few weeks they let her divert some ‘sick’ people from the trains to her hospital. Once there, she and her fellow nurses had to break the legs of otherwise healthy patients before inspections to prove they were unfit to travel. Ala became known in the Ghetto as ‘the good fairy’.

  And so Irena and her most trusted friends smuggled children and babies out by increasingly inventive means. They hid children under rags and in coffins moving
in and out of the Ghetto under the legitimacy of Irena’s epidemic control passes. Babies, carefully tranquillised by Ala so that they would not make a sound, were smuggled out in burlap sacks and toolboxes and in briefcases. Tunnels dug by children, buildings with secret doors on either side of the Ghetto’s perimeter, and toxic sewers provided dangerous escape routes. If they made it out, they would be met by Irena or one of her network on the other side.

  Once they were out, though, the children were in more danger than ever. To be Jewish and caught outside the Ghetto walls was an instant death sentence. The first port of call for an escaped child would be one of Irena’s safe houses. If he or she was old enough to understand what was going on, they had to memorise Catholic prayers and sometimes undergo makeovers to appear more ‘Aryan’. Toddlers, though, couldn’t understand what was happening and were prone to speak Yiddish and accidentally reveal their identities, and so were among the riskiest to rescue. Three-year-olds, you’ll know if you’ve ever met one, don’t generally do what they’re told. Yet Irena carried on, developing new escape routes and safe havens on the outside. Their former social work professor from the Polish Free University, Dr Radlinska, herself born Jewish, helped coordinate the work of several secret operations like Irena’s from her hiding place in a convent.

  In the spring of 1943, 750 men and women of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed resistance against the Germans. Eighty five per cent of the Ghetto’s population had already been deported, and those who remained were hunted where they hid. Those young people who remained and decided to fight only had revolvers, home-made bombs and a few smuggled rifles, but on their first day of fighting managed to take the Germans by surprise and force their retreat. Ala was still inside, and set up a medical facility for wounded fighters, while Irena was able to sneak in and out of the Ghetto and rescue more children in the chaos of the battle.