Krystyna Skarbek

On 16 March 2021 author Dana Schwartz released a podcast episode about the life of Krystyna Skarbek, "From Poland With Love".

In 2020, English Heritage announced that it would place a blue plaque honouring Skarbek at the site of the former Shellbourne Hotel. The plaque was unveiled in September 2020, six years after Granville's biographer Clare Mulley had proposed the plaque to English Heritage.

In 2020 Clare Mulley unveiled an English Heritage Blue Plaque commemorating Krystyna Skarbek, at her last London address, now 1 Lexham Gardens Hotel, Kensington.

2018: Michael Morpurgo's book In the Mouth of the Wolf centres on Skarbek's World War II Resistance work with Morpurgo's uncle, Francis Cammaerts.

In May 2017, a bronze bust, by Ian Wolter, was unveiled at the Polish Hearth Club (Ognisko Polskie) in Kensington, London.

Unveiled in 2017 at Ognisko Polskie (the Polish Hearth Club), in London, was a bronze bust of Skarbek commissioned of sculptor Ian Wolter.

On 3 May 2016 BBC Radio 4 broadcast an episode of Great Lives in which Krystyna Skarbek's life was proposed by Lt General Sir Graeme Lamb, with Clare Mulley as the expert witness.

Granville was interred in St Mary's Roman Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, northwest London. In 2013, a ceremony marked the renovation of her grave by the Polish Heritage Society.

In 1999, Polish writer Maria Nurowska published a novel, Miłośnica (The Lover) – an account of a fictional female journalist's attempt to probe Skarbek's story.

Following Granville's death, Andrzej Kowerski (Andrew Kennedy) led a group of men, especially Cammaerts, Roper, and Patrick Howarth, dedicated to ensuring that her name not be "sullied and succeeded in stopping several press reports and two books." Author Madeleine Masson said that "twelve men who all loved Christine...banded together to make sure that no-one wrote rubbish about her," the "rubbish" apparently being stories of her active and diverse sex life. Masson eventually received the support of the group to publish a "scrubbed" version of Granville's life. Kowerski/Kennedy died of cancer in Munich, Germany in December 1988. His ashes were flown to London and interred at the foot of Skarbek's grave.

In 1971, the Shellbourne Hotel was bought by a Polish group; in a storeroom, they found her trunk, containing her clothes, papers, and SOE issue dagger. This dagger, her medals, and some of her papers are now held in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum at 20 Prince's Gate, Kensington, London.

After the war, Skarbek was left without financial reserves or a native country to return to. Xan Fielding, whom she had saved from execution by the Gestapo, wrote in his 1954 book, Hide and Seek, dedicated "To the memory of Christine Granville":

Author William F. Nolan claimed that Ian Fleming, in his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), modelled Vesper Lynd on Christine Granville. According to Nolan, Fleming also based Tatiana Romanova, in his 1957 novel From Russia, with Love, on Skarbek. Skarbek biographer Clare Mulley, however, wrote that, "if Christine was immortalized as the carelessly beautiful double agent Vesper Lynd, Fleming is more likely to have been inspired by the stories he heard than the woman in person.... [H]e never claimed to have met her, even in passing."

Skarbek is often characterized in terms such as Britain's "most glamorous spy." She was stabbed to death in 1952 in London by an obsessed and spurned suitor who was subsequently hanged.

Christine Granville was stabbed to death in the Shellbourne Hotel, 1 Lexham Gardens, Earls Court, in London, on 15 June 1952. She had begun work as steward some six weeks earlier with the Union-Castle Line and had booked into the hotel on 14 June, having returned from a working voyage out of Durban, South Africa, on Winchester Castle. Her body was identified by her cousin, Andrzej Skarbek. When her death was recorded at the Royal Borough of Kensington's register office, her age was given as 37, the age she claimed on her British passport.

Her assailant was Dennis George Muldowney, the obsessed man who had worked with Skarbek as a steward and was at the time of her murder a Reform Club porter. After being convicted of her murder, Muldowney was hanged at HMP Pentonville on 30 September 1952.

As her life became so wildly reported, Kowerski/Kennedy asked their mutual friend, W. Stanley Moss, to write something definitive; a series of four illustrated articles by Moss were published in Picture Post in 1952.

One of the other SOE agents Skarbek had rescued, Francis Cammaerts, named his daughter Christine (born 1948) after her.

For her work in conjunction with the British authorities, in May 1947 she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), an award normally associated with officers of the equivalent military rank of lieutenant colonel, and a level above the most usual award of Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) given to other women agents of SOE. Despite her problems with the Poles during the war, in 1945 when Skarbek visited Polish military headquarters in her British WAAF uniform, she was treated by the Polish military chiefs with the highest respect.

When Skarbek's husband, Jerzy Giżycki, was informed that Skarbek and Kowerski's services were being dispensed with, he took umbrage and abruptly bowed out of his own career as a British intelligence agent. When Skarbek told her husband that she loved Kowerski, Giżycki left for London, eventually emigrating to Canada. (The couple were formally divorced at the Polish consulate in Berlin on 1 August 1946.)

With the two invasions in Normandy and southern France in summer 1944, these distinctions became irrelevant, and almost all the SOE Sections in France were united with the Maquis into the Forces Francaises de l'Interieur (FFI). (There was one exception: The EU/P Section, which was formed by Poles in France and remained part of the trans-European Polish Resistance movement, under Polish command.)

Skarbek, now more commonly known as Christine Granville, parachuted into France on the night of 6/7 July 1944. She became part of the Jockey network headed by Francis Cammaerts, Belgian-British in nationality and a former pacifist. The job of Cammaerts and his team was to organize the French resistance fighters, the maquis, in southeastern France to weaken the German occupiers prior to the Allied invasion of southern France, Operation Dragoon, which would take place on 15 August. Skarbek was Cammaerts' courier, replacing Cecily Lefort who had been captured by the Germans and would be executed. She also had been given the task of attempting to subvert the Polish conscripts in the German army who were stationed along the Franco-Italian border.

Rescuing Cammaerts. On 13 August 1944, at Digne, two days before the Allied Operation Dragoon landings in southern France, Cammaerts, Xan Fielding – another SOE agent, who had previously operated in Crete – and a French officer, Christian Sorensen, were arrested at a roadblock by the Gestapo. Skarbek rushed back from the Col de Larche, halting briefly along the way to meet a recently arrived 10-man allied military mission. She told them that, in Cammaerts' absence, she was in charge and arranged transportation for them. She also tried without success to persuade French resistance leaders to storm the prison in Digne and rescue Cammaerts and the others. She then put aside her aversion to bicycles, and cycled 40 kilometres (25 mi) to Digne.

When the SOE teams returned from France (or in some cases, were given 24 hours to depart by de Gaulle) in autumn 1944, some of the British women sought new missions in the Pacific War, where the war with the Empire of Japan continued; but Skarbek, as a Pole, was ideally placed to serve as a courier for missions to her homeland. As the Red Army advanced across Poland, the British government and Polish government-in-exile worked together to leave a network in place that would report on events in the People's Republic of Poland. Kowerski and Skarbek were now fully reconciled with the Polish forces and were preparing to be dropped into Poland in early 1945. However, the mission, called Operation Freston, was cancelled because the first party to enter Poland were captured by the Red Army (they were released in February 1945).

The women of SOE were all given military rank, with honorary commissions in either the Women's Transport Service, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), officially part of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) though a very elite and autonomous part, or the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). In preparation for her service in France, she had been a member of the FANY. On her return, she transferred to the WAAF as a flight officer until the end of the war in Europe: 21 November 1944 to 14 May 1945.

She persuaded Polish Olympic skier Jan Marusarz, brother of Nordic skier Stanisław Marusarz, to escort her across the snow-covered Tatra Mountains into Nazi-occupied Poland. Arriving in Warsaw, she pleaded vainly with her mother to leave Poland. Stefania Skarbek refused; she was determined to stay in Warsaw to continue teaching French to small children. In January 1942, Stefania was arrested by the Germans as a Jew and disappeared into Warsaw's Pawiak prison. The prison had been designed in the mid-19th century by Skarbek's great-great-uncle Fryderyk Skarbek, a prison reformer and Frédéric Chopin's godfather, who had been tutored in the French language by Chopin's father.

Leaving Bulgaria, Kowerski and Skarbek continued on to Turkey. In Istanbul, the couple met with exiled Poles and Skarbek tried to ensure that the courier routes from Istanbul to Poland remained functional. Skarbek's husband, the intimidating Jerzy Giżycki, met them in Istanbul on 17 March 1941. Apparently no fireworks ensued when the husband met Kowerski, and they persuaded Giżycki to go to Budapest to take over Skarbek's previous role as the contact point for the British with the Polish resistance. The couple's next destinations in the Opel were Syria and Lebanon, which were under the control of Vichy France. Skarbek obtained visas from reluctant Vichy officials and they continued their journey. They then entered Mandatory Palestine and proceeded onward to Cairo, Egypt, arriving in May 1941.

There were also specific suspicions about Kowerski. These were addressed in London by General Colin Gubbins – to be, from September 1943, head of SOE – in a letter of 17 June 1941 to Polish Commander-in-Chief and the Prime Minister of Poland Władysław Sikorski:.mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}

In June 1941, Peter Wilkinson of SOE came to Cairo and officially dismissed Skarbek and Kowerski, although keeping them on the SOE payroll with a small retainer that forced them to live in near poverty. Kowerski, who was under less suspicion than Skarbek, eventually cleared up any misunderstandings with General Kopański and was able to resume intelligence work.

A week after the dismissal of Skarbek and Kowerski, on 22 June 1941 Germany began its Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union, predicted by the intelligence the couple had passed along to the British from the Musketeers. It is now known that advance information about Operation Barbarossa had also been provided by a number of other sources, including Ultra.

During the remainder of 1941, 1942, and 1943, Skarbek was given several small tasks by SOE, such as intelligence gathering in Syria and Cairo, including passing along information to the British on Polish intelligence and resistance agencies. She turned down offers of office work and continued to be sidelined from the kind of dangerous and difficult work she desired. Both she and Kowerski continued to be under suspicion by the British and resented by the Polish government-in-exile because they worked for Britain.

She became a British agent months before the SOE was founded in July 1940. She was the first female agent of the British to serve in the field and the longest-serving of all Britain's wartime women agents. Her resourcefulness and success have been credited with influencing the organisation's decision to recruit more women as agents in Nazi-occupied countries. In 1941 she began using the alias Christine Granville, a name she legally adopted upon naturalisation as a British subject in December 1946.

An incident that probably dates to Skarbek's first visit back to Poland in February 1940 illustrates the hazards she faced while working in her occupied homeland. At a Warsaw café, she was hailed by a woman acquaintance: "Krystyna! Krystyna Skarbek! What are you doing here? We heard that you'd gone abroad!" When Skarbek denied that her name was Krystyna Skarbek, the lady answered that she would have sworn she was Krystyna Skarbek; the resemblance was positively uncanny! After the woman left, Skarbek, to minimise suspicion, tarried a while before leaving the café.

Skarbek spent 1940 travelling back and forth between Poland and Hungary. In Budapest, in January 1941, she showed her penchant for stratagem when she and Kowerski were arrested by the Hungarian police and imprisoned and questioned by the Gestapo. She feigned symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis by biting her tongue until it bled and a doctor diagnosed her (incorrectly) with terminal tuberculosis. The Germans released them, but the couple was followed by the police afterwards and they decided to flee Hungary, a German ally.

Upon the outbreak of World War II, the couple sailed for London arriving 6 October 1939, where Skarbek sought to offer her services in the struggle against the common enemy. The British authorities showed little interest but were eventually convinced by Skarbek's acquaintances, including journalist Frederick Augustus Voigt, who introduced her to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). The first SIS mention of her was in December 1939. She was described as a "flaming Polish patriot, expert skier, and great adventuress" and "absolutely fearless."

From London Skarbek, now a British agent, journeyed to Budapest, Hungary, arriving on 21 December 1939. Hungary was not yet a participant in World War II, but was leaning toward Nazi Germany. Skarbek's cover story for her presence in Hungary was that she was a journalist.

Upon their arrival at SOE offices in Cairo, Kowerski and Skarbek learned they were under suspicion because of Skarbek's contacts with the Polish intelligence organisation, the Musketeers. This group had been formed in October 1939 by engineer-inventor Stefan Witkowski Another source of suspicion was the ease with which she had obtained transit visas through French-mandated Syria and Lebanon from the pro-Vichy French consul in Istanbul. Only German spies, some Polish intelligence officers believed, could have obtained the visas.

On 2 November 1938, Krystyna and Giżycki married at the Evangelical Reformed Church in Warsaw. Soon after he accepted a diplomatic posting to Ethiopia, where he served as Poland's consul general until September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Skarbek later said of Giżycki: "He was my Svengali for so many years that he would never believe that I could ever leave him for good."

On 21 April 1930, Krystyna married a young businessman, Gustaw Gettlich at the Spiritual Seminary Church in Warsaw. They proved incompatible, and the marriage soon ended without rancour. A subsequent love affair came to naught when the young man's mother refused to consider the penniless divorcée as a potential daughter-in-law.

The 1920s left the family in straitened financial circumstances, and they had to give up their country estate and move to Warsaw. In 1930, when Krystyna was 22, Count Jerzy died. The Goldfeder financial empire had almost completely collapsed, and there was barely enough money to support the widowed Countess Stefania. Krystyna, not wishing to be a burden to her mother, worked at a Fiat car dealership, but soon became ill from automobile fumes and had to give up the job. At first she was thought, on the basis of shadows on her chest x-rays, to be suffering from tuberculosis, which had killed her father. She received compensation from her employer's insurance company and took her physicians' advice to lead as much of an open-air life as she could. She began spending a great deal of time hiking and skiing the Tatra Mountains. In 1930, Skarbek was a runner up in the Miss Poland beauty contest.

The British Ambassador in Hungary, Owen O'Malley and his wife the novelist Ann Bridge, undertook to help Skarbek and Kowerski escape Hungary. O'Malley issued British passports to them. Kowerski became "Anthony Kennedy", and Skarbek became "Christine Granville", a name she used for the rest of her life. She also shaved seven years off her age. Her passport gave her birth date as 1915. A British Embassy driver smuggled Skarbek out of Hungary and into Yugoslavia in the trunk of O'Malley's Chrysler. Kowerski, a.k.a. Kennedy, drove his Opel across the border. The couple reunited in Yugoslavia and O'Malley joined them later in Belgrade, where they enjoyed a few days of "drinking champagne in Belgrade's nightclubs and belly-dancing bars." In late February, Skarbek and Kowerski continued their journey in the Opel, first to Sofia, Bulgaria. Sofia's best hotel "was full of Nazis". Skarbek and Kowerski called at the British Legation, meeting with air attaché Aidan Crawley. The couple gave Crawley rolls of microfilm which they had received from a Polish intelligence organisation called the "Musketeers". The microfilm contained photos of a German military buildup near the border with the Soviet Union, indicating that a German invasion of the Soviet Union was being planned. The microfilm was sent to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in London, who could scarcely believe it; but by March, with information from other sources, the Prime Minister was persuaded that Skarbek and Kowerski's intelligence was accurate. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

In Hungary, Skarbek encountered Andrzej Kowerski (1912–1988), now a Polish army officer, who later used the British nom de guerre "Andrew Kennedy". Skarbek had first met him as a child and briefly encountered him again before the war at Zakopane. Kowerski, who had lost part of his leg in a pre-war hunting accident, was now exfiltrating Polish and other Allied military personnel and collecting intelligence. Skarbek helped organise a system of Polish couriers who brought intelligence reports from Warsaw to Budapest. Kowerski (Kennedy)'s cousin, Ludwik Popiel, managed to smuggle out a unique Polish anti-tank rifle, model 35, with the stock and barrel sawn off for easier transport. Skarbek, for a time, concealed it in her Budapest apartment. However, it never saw wartime service with the Allies, as the designs and specifications had deliberately been destroyed upon the outbreak of war and there was no time for reverse engineering. Captured stocks of the rifle were, however, used by the Germans and the Italians.

Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, OBE, GM (Polish pronunciation: [krɨˈstɨna ˈskarbɛk], /krɪstiːnə skɑːrbɛk/; 1 May 1908 – 15 June 1952), also known as Christine Granville, was a Polish agent of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. She became celebrated for her daring exploits in intelligence and irregular-warfare missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France. Journalist Alistair Horne, who described himself in 2012 as one of the few people still alive who had known Skarbek, called her the "bravest of the brave." Spymaster Vera Atkins of the SOE described Skarbek as "very brave, very attractive, but a loner and a law unto herself."

Krystyna Skarbek was born in 1908 in Warsaw, to Count Jerzy Skarbek, a Roman Catholic, and Stefania (née Goldfeder), the daughter of a wealthy assimilated Jewish family. Marrying Stefania in late December 1899, Jerzy Skarbek used his wife's dowry (her father was a banker) to pay his debts and continue his lavish lifestyle.