 because this is set for our speaker and I don't wanna change it. I'm Arthur Zorn and it's my pleasure to be here tonight. I thought I'd just give you a little background very briefly on what this is about and how this all became an event. And how it came as an event is Kathleen Kean and, oh there she is, and Danielle Woskansky, staff members, important people here call me this spring and we were talking about ways to augment the already, I don't think any of the work that Las Nation Theater does needs augmentation, but hopefully tonight we'll augment the show cabaret in particular. We have a paint and sip event coming up that's been very successful the last few years and normally I've had some of my own art in the gallery and tonight from a Holocaust Memorial, important writings there that you might want to read the program's about an hour and 15 minutes long, no intermission, we're just gonna go right ahead and Danielle will zoo you right in about the specifics of tonight. I think it's gonna be very, become very knowledgeable on a certain aspect of that time that is resonating in our hearts and fears right now again. Unfortunately, the last thing I want to say is about the musical part of this. There are readings and then I'm going to play just four, I believe it is, every time Danielle sits down, that's my cue. Brief, like not longer than a minute. A theme and variations on Eastern European theme that's expanded and then three longer pieces. There's an intense part, there's some very humorous things but there's some very intense things and to give you time to absorb that between them, I'm gonna play a little bit longer improvisations and we'll see how they go and then we'll all conclude and congratulate Danielle on her wonderful studies. We had no idea when I showed that day that someone had an intellectual scholar here who has done wonderful research on the subject you're gonna hear about tonight. So, Danielle is somewhere and welcome, Danielle, thank you. World War II has always held a special fascination for people. It's a war that never ended, artistically speaking that is. The Second World War may have seized hostilities on September 2nd, 1945 but the world of film, literature, art, and theater have never stopped fighting. Nearly 70 years on, the demand for art based on the Second World War appears unstoppable, the supply inexhaustible. Even more than World War II, audiences have always held a fascination with spies. Espionage is seen as dark, edgy, seedy, thrilling and when it's a woman's spy, we think violence, intrigue and sex, right? However, the true experience of spies, especially female spies during World War II have largely remained unknown. Their exploits have gone unrecognized despite their dangerous and life-threatening work. The SOE, or Special Operations Executive had a record 55 female agents, far surpassing the use of women in official active intelligence roles than in any other time in British history. Tonight, I'd like to share the stories of these female spies with you. I want to tell you their lives, how they ended up in the war, what they accomplished, but beyond that, I want you to understand their experience because only then can you acknowledge both their sacrifices and their achievements. Realized women. And to some extent it did. Women were placed in menial positions that took little thought. However, slowly women began to be able to join the service, but their official roles were always to assist men, not to do very much work of their own. There was some progress towards integrated work, but the distinction between men and women was always upheld. For example, women in service could make all of the calculations and do any maneuver to move guns, but they weren't actually able to fire them. Or they could transport equipment, but they couldn't transport passengers. So women who found their way into the crossfire and held themselves in good stead were recognized, but they were given civilians honors, not military, because the British command didn't recognize women as being capable of performing in a military capacity. The SOE was officially formed in June of 1940 under the leadership of Hugh Dalton, and its role was to cultivate resistance for those living in occupied lands. Churchill ordered the SOE to set Europe ablaze, and the organization stopped at nothing, not even gender roles to accomplish that mission. This was due partly to the new strategies that the British government felt could be utilized in World War II that hadn't been utilized in World War I, particularly that of guerrilla warfare. Sabotage was a key element, and that's what the SOE became solely responsible for. As a new organization, it was much easier for women to be utilized as there weren't any limitations already in place to be fought against as there would be in an existing organization. However, even with unofficial permission from Churchill and his cabinet to employ female spies, the SOE still faced many obstacles to retain them. Governmental lawyers and the highest Whitehall officials were opposed. Contemporary journalist Sarah Holm explained the dilemma in using women spies the most clearly, and she wrote, although the SOE already employed scores of women, mostly as typists, drivers, and clerks, women in the Army, Navy, and Royal Air Force were barred from armed combat. The statutes of the three services simply didn't envisage women bearing arms, and therefore there was no legal authority for service women to carry out any kind of guerrilla work that the SOE had in mind. Furthermore, though all of the SOE's agents would be without uniforms and therefore liable to be shot as spies, women agents would have even less legal protection in the field than men. The 1929 Geneva Convention and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, the main legal instruments offering protection to prisoners of war, made no provisions at all for protecting women as women were not envisaged as combatants. These were serious concerns in which the organization had to sidestep both the law and military opposition. In the end, the SOE managed to avoid these issues by commissioning the SOE's women recruits through the first aid nursing no-minery, which as a civilian organization was not subjected to the same rules government entities were, and so they avoided violating any laws or statutes. Yet because of societal restrictions, if the use of women as guerrilla fighters were to become public, the women would be disavowed, and the government would refuse to acknowledge or take responsibility for the women. Still, the SOE pushed forward, convinced that the job of courier would be best carried out by women. The female spies through talent spotting, which meant that people didn't apply but were funneled to them. Most had applied to work at other organizations like the Royal Air Force, but were then chosen for special employment. Most did not know why they had been chosen for secret work, though they usually had to do with their ability to speak French or if they had French lineage. The organization could seek out whoever had the talents and skills that they deemed necessary to become a spy, regardless of gender. It wasn't until April of 1942, though, that the SOE began to actually place women in the field. And even then, these women were initially only to be used as couriers in the field or as administrative staff in British headquarters. Yet women found their way into the field as the government faced bleaker and bleaker prospects in the war. They were forced to adapt to the wartime emergency and utilize everyone, even women, to turn the desperate tide of the war. The agency even had the power to sidestep the British national only law, which only allowed British citizens to serve as intelligence officers due to concerns about their loyalties. If their talent was enough, the organization would find a way to use them. So the SOE had active female field agents trained in weapons and on-arm combat, just as any male agent would be. Initially, they weren't supposed to have as active or dangerous roles as male spies. Part of the benefit of using female spies, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster said was, from the purely tactical point of view, women were able to move about without exciting so much suspicion as men and were therefore exceedingly useful to us as couriers. But by war's end, the missions they were assigned were no less dangerous than those of men. Spy Hannah Shanish courageously went forward alone with three male refugees she met along the way on her very first mission after her male counterparts refused to join, deeming it way too dangerous. And of the 55 female SOE agents, 13 were killed while out in the field, which amounts to nearly 25% of all of the female agents. The percentage of female SOE agents is counted tantamount with a number of all SOE spies killed in action in France. So the SOE's view and use of women was well in advance of the contemporary stance on using women in combat. However, this consideration only came about much later in the war, namely 1942 as I previously mentioned, and many of the standards that women were held to were much lower for men. SOE agent Sidney Hudson described himself, I played golf and tennis in the summer with occasional interludes for mountain climbing. In the winter I skied and played ice hockey. All of this obviously left me little time for any educational studies. His main qualifications for being a spy was being upper class, educated, athletic and fluent in French. On the other hand, many of the women recruited to be spies were highly skilled in languages, hand to hand combat and more. Josephine Butler, who was a spy for Churchill's Secret Circle, was college educated, trained as a doctor, spoke multiple languages, was a judo champion, and had a photographic memory, while SOE agent Mary Catherine Herbert spoke five languages that the SOE was going to practice. It was very specific. He believed that there were clear distinctions between war from without and war from within, and that sabotage was war from within, and that the latter was more likely to be better conducted by civilians than by soldiers. This allowed more women the chance to be recruited, even as women in service were not yet truly recognized as members of the military. If we go back to good ol' agent Hudson, he could attest to the remarkable ability of women to blend in as civilians better than any male spy could, saying, I felt that a girl could pass unnoticed in the town or the countryside much more easily than could a man. He even made it one of his basic principles of underground warfare, saying, women may be better agents than men, and certainly less liable to arouse suspicion. A man together with a woman will also attract less notice than a man alone. Yet, even then, there was a clear separation in the treatment of male and female spies. Though women were out in the field committing acts of subterfuge just as men were, their acts of subterfuge were less dangerous in nature. Men in civilian clothes would attack military convoys while women would carry clandestine messages. Though supposedly participating in equally important roles, men were given jobs that were more active while women were supposed to stay back, doing tasks that put them less in the way of their comrades and out of harm's way. When France did fall, Britain was thrown into a state of emergency. The war was obviously not going as planned, so the government from Churchill to his ministers to the newly appointed head of the SOE, Hugh Dalton, had to make use of their every asset to turn the tide against tyranny. And thus, women finally had the opportunity to be utilized to their full potential as they never had before, as spies. However, being allowed to enter the field did not mean that their path was clear of obstacles. Now that women could be spies, they had to tackle the new and unique challenges of being a woman out in the field. So the first question I'd like to pose to you is why did these women spy? SOE spy Sonia D'Artois Butt reportedly said, what little I was able to do was motivated by my love for France, and because I could not imagine not doing my upvotes when my country was at war. While fellow SOE spy Meryl Bick hid her past case of meningitis from the agency, these carried a small risk of recurring. It would have been against protocol to allow Bick to serve. But so great was her courage and her desire to see and serve her beloved country once again, that she felt that the danger to her own life was of risk worth taking. This was particularly notable as Bick did end up passing away as a result of a resurgence of the disease while out in the field. Yvonne Cormou, who was another spy for the SOE, described why she went as such. The question of not going didn't arise. I was ready to go. I'd steeled myself. There was constant fear, but you had to learn to live with it. Beryl Escott, who was a contemporary squadron leader in the Royal Air Force, described the motivations of SOE intelligence officers sinkly, showing the depths of their patriotism when she said, SOE agents were not professional spies, just men and women volunteering to organize and supply resistance in an enemy-occupied country for the duration of the war. Their pay was absurdly low and their abiding motive was to help and liberate the country that they loved. Conjures that female spies faced was their treatment by men on all sides. Their partners, their leaders, their contacts, and their enemies. While there was female solidarity in the field, every woman had a male partner or supervisor. And this female solidarity was formed in the training school before being sent out or in prison after they had already been captured. They were constantly underestimated and derided, hindered from doing their work by male contacts, staff and spies. Often this wasn't intentional. The men were either trying to overcompensate for the female weaknesses that they expected or they believed that women's strengths and successes were due to a more pronounced masculinity or they were simply unable to look past a spy's gender. Spy trainers for the SOE said that they often had the female trainees parachute first in the practice jumps out of the planes at Tatton Park, a training facility, because they believed that the men would do better and push themselves harder if women led the way. In the field, SOE spy Ann Marie Walters encountered difficulties completing her tasks because the men didn't want to work with her. She was tasked with helping to train French McKee resistance fighters to use the new British and American arms, which he never before encountered. However, the men didn't want to be instructed by a girl and they gave her a really hard time until they realized she was actually competent and could do her job. And Bunny Rhymills, who was the live sander pilot who shuttled SOE spy Cecile Margaux Le Four to France, was not very impressed by her French. To him it didn't seem all that hot. He also thought privately that she looked rather like a vicar's wife. Men's resistance to the use of women was an ongoing complication that the SOE didn't have a good way of handling. When women were first to be allowed into the field, many trainers objected, but as soon as they discovered that women could be just as skillful and brave as men, and this was soon proved in the field, where they also had to overcome the extra obstacle of the ingrained prejudice to women of the people in the countries where they worked, no small task in and of itself, thus the most unlikely of agents became assets. Even the SOE was referred to by Churchill as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Hudson recalled a scenario in his SOE training where one of the directors of operations, Major Gerard Morrell, explained the firm's stance on female agents. In our experience, women are more brave, more loyal, and more resourceful than men. However, Hudson describes acts of sexual misconduct he committed against his partner, Muriel Bick, blatantly unaware that his behavior was harmful. When they initially parachuted into France after landing, Hudson disentangled himself from his parachute, walked over to Bick, waited for her to disentangle herself, ignoring the third person who had parachuted with them, who was another man who, and then without a word, dipped her into a kiss. Hudson didn't ask for permission before kissing her, he'd only just met her as well a few hours before and they hadn't even really conversed. He notices that she gave him a look afterwards but he discounts it. He was a married man with a child and it was also not the first time that he'd parachuted into France. His treatment of Bick was biased from the start and he said it himself in his memoirs explaining, once more we went through the procedure that George and I had already experienced 18 months before. We felt ourselves to be old hands now and of course there was this young attractive woman to impress. After Bick's death, Hudson was partnered with Butt, who I mentioned before, Sonia de Artois Butt. When he was partnered with Sonia, he also handled her with kid gloves. He describes a morning a few days after they were partnered. Sonia was sleeping upstairs and I was installed on a sofa on the ground floor. We were awakened by the sound of bombs falling nearby. Thinking that Sonia might be frightened, I dashed upstairs to her room. I need not have bothered. She was completely unperturbed. Later on in their relationship and their partnership, Butt reveals to Hudson that she was sexually assaulted by two German officers. They didn't even know she was a spy. She was just a woman in the countryside that they chose to attack. She began by saying, something rather disagreeable happened to me last night. She told them what happened, finishing nonchalantly. They didn't discover the American passes. Hudson was speechless at her cavalier attitude, but it was an attitude that Butt felt required to take in order to keep her standing in his eyes. Her susceptibility to sexual assault as a woman would have made her a liability as a spy. To show her strength and to prove that she could handle being a spy just like any man could, she waited until the next day to even report her assault and then brushed over as lightly as she could. To do otherwise would be weakness on her part and she would have been seen as a hysterical and unreliable partner. Hudson confirms that the women were seen and treated differently and thus had to work harder to prove their capabilities. With this anecdote about being interviewed for a TV documentary in the 1990s, the producer was looking at photos of the female agents hanging on the walls at a special forces club in London and he asked Hudson, I see that some of the women were rather handsome. Wasn't it difficult not to fall in love with them? To which Hudson responded, I can confirm the truth of both of these pronouncements. This was obviously meant to be a compliment to female spies and especially the ones he worked with but these small details that he slipped into his narrative are problematic. They show clear and blatant examples of women having to go above and beyond even the men's call of duty and how one of the most common risks that they face out in the field is their partner's own attitudes towards them as women. This was further supported by the fact that Hudson confessed to having fallen in love with Sonia though she resisted having an affair and after her service returned home to her husband. Hudson, on the other hand, divorced his wife unable to stop pining for Sonia. Into the biography of some specific female spies and the first woman I'm going to talk about is Hannah Shenesh and in Israel she's very famous. There are actually more streets named after Hannah than there are after Golda Meir, the first female prime minister of Israel. So Hannah Shenesh was born on July 17, 1921 to a Jewish family in Hungary. She was enrolled in a private, Protestant school for girls that also happened to accept Catholic and Jewish pupils. Most of those of the Jewish faith had to pay three times the amount that the Catholics paid. However, Shenesh only had to pay twice the regular tuition because she was considered a gifted student. This, along with the realization that the situation of the Jews in Hungary was becoming precarious, prompted Shenesh to embrace Zionism. She graduated in 1939 and decided to immigrate to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine in order to study and the girl's agricultural school at Nahalol. In 1941, she joined the votes Stot-Yam and then she joined the Haganah which was the paramilitary group that ended up laying the foundation for the Israel Defense Forces. It was a clandestine military project whose ultimate purpose was to offer aid to the beleaguered European Jewry. In 1943, she enlisted in the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force as an aircraft woman's second class. Later that same year, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive. On March 14, 1944, she and colleagues Yolele Pauly and Peretz Goldstein were parachuted into Yugoslavia and they joined a partisan group in order to aid the anti-Nazi forces until they were able to commence their true mission which was to enter Hungary. But the German invasion of Hungary in March of 1944 postponed their plans. After landing, they learned that the Germans had already moved forward and begun their occupation of Hungary so the men decided to call off the mission. It was too dangerous. Shenesh decided to continue on and she headed for the Hungarian border. Once there, she and her companions, some refugees, were arrested by the Hungarian forces who found her British military transmitter which is what she used to communicate with the SOE and other partisan groups. She was taken to a prison, stripped, tied to a chair and whipped and clubbed for three days. She lost several teeth as a result of the beating. The guards wanted to know the code for her transmitter so they could find out who the parachutists were and trap others. She got transferred to a Budapest prison where she was repeatedly tortured and interrogated but she only revealed her name and she refused to provide the transmitter code. While in prison, she used a mirror to flash signals out the window to prisoners and other cells and communicated using large cut-out letters that she placed in her cell window one at a time and by drawing them again devied in the dust. When the Hungarian authorities realized that Shannesh would not be broken, they arrested her mother and the two women came face to face with each other for the first time in almost five years. Catherine Shannesh had had no idea that her daughter had left Palestine not to speak of the fact that she was now in Hungary. Initially shocked as they brought in the young woman with bruised eyes and who had lost a front tooth in the torture process but she rapidly regained her composure and both mother and daughter refused to give the authorities the performance that would lead to the information they had sought. For three months, the women were so near yet so far sharing the same prison walls but unable to do more than catch the short glimpses of each other. In September of 1944, after Catherine was suddenly released she spent most of her waking hours seeking legal assistance for her daughter who, being a Hungarian national, was to be tried as a spy. In November of 1944, Shannesh came up before a tribunal and eloquently pleaded her own cause warning the judges that as the end of the war was nearing their own fates would soon hang in the balance. She was still convicted as a spy and she was sentenced to death but the court decided not to carry out her sentence with any alacrity. However, her poignant speech that she gave during the trial was taken as a personal affront to the officer in charge of the prison she was being held at, Colonel Simon who came into her cell on the morning of November 7th and presented her with two options to beg for a pardon or to face death by a firing squad. Refusing to beg clemency from her captors who she didn't even think were legally able to try her case Shannesh penned short notes to her mother and her comrades and she went to her death at the age of 23 and a snow covered Budapest courtyard refusing a blindfold so that she would have to look her murderers in the face. Her body was buried by unknown people in the Jewish graveyard of Budapest. Her body was eventually moved to a place of honor in Mount Purzel in Israel where fallen soldiers even now are buried. I've personally been there to visit and I can attest that her grave is in a place of honor. After the Cold War a Hungarian military court officially exonerated her and her kin in Israel were informed on November 5th, 1993. She kept diary entries until her last day where she wrote her poetry. One poem began a voice called and I went for a voice called Another read Blessed is the match that it consumed in kindling flame Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart Blessed is the heart with the strength to stop its beating for honor's sake Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame The following lines were found in Hannah's cell after her execution One, two, three, eight feet long two strides across the rest is dark life hangs over me like a question mark One, two, three, maybe another week or next month may still find me here but death I feel is very near I could have been 23 next July I gambled on what mattered most the dice were cast I lost especially after her father abandoned their through though considered a brilliant pupil at school she was forever feeling out of place and unhappy with being bogged down by household chores like cooking and cleaning she ran away from home at the age of 16 and became a nurse at an asylum when she got a request from an aunt who passed away she made her way to Europe as a journalist and European correspondent such as for her snooze shortly after she moved to France she met Henri Fioca an extremely wealthy industrialist and they became engaged like that her life was transformed she married Henri and they began to live an indolent lifestyle despite the luxuries her everyday life now offered she and her husband worried about the war desperately wanted to find a way to help our country her position of wealth now afforded her the ability to do so yet even her husband was at a loss to understand her motives and wish to contribute as a woman it will be my turn soon Henri said worry about that when it comes and when it does I want to go too my dear nanny what as an ambulance driver but you can't drive you must have me taught but you have no ambulance and France has no ambulances either I know you must give me one of the firm's trucks convert it for me then I'll drive it to the front but nanny want because I want to help you can help here don't be stupid Henri here we help no one but why do you want to help or is it for women how often have I told you how I won the last war for France now I will win it again have you no confidence in me certainly that's why I want to go to the war myself I'm sick of hearing how you won the last one this one I shall win despite not understanding Wake's desire to involve herself in the war he provided her with an ambulance and driving lessons Wake was as good as her word and worked tirelessly through the first half of 1940 at first she delivered clothes to refugee centers but when the blitz began she did whatever she could to contribute Nancy picked up refugees wounded soldiers machine guns civilians anyone at all always ignoring the police who forbade her to approach the front any closer and would load up her ambulance once again the police believed that the work that Wake was devoted to was far too dangerous for a mere woman to perform they didn't believe that she was capable of this kind of work and wouldn't succeed anyways they didn't feel the need to stop a silly interfering woman who wanted to put herself at risk for a mission she could surely never accomplish if Wake had been a man attempting the same thing she most likely would have been stopped or reasoned with or not allowed to interfere when her ambulance finally broke down and France fell to Germany Wake was devastated and felt at a loss there wasn't anything else she could do however once home with Henri again she met with a British officer who was interned at the fortress in Marseille by the French military authorities she began providing assistance at great personal risk to those interned there despite his fears for her Henri provided Wake with any money she asked for to support the plans to help those British officers escape and the prisoners of war to escape as well Wake was asked to carry messages for some of the escaped spies one warned that it might be risky she replied, what isn't when she successfully carried these messages she was then asked to deliver packages as well and then she became a courier for a second French resistance group she was forced into leaving a dual life no one could know what she was doing as she traversed France delivering letters and packages and so she had to maintain her opulent lifestyle as well parting late into the night with her friends in public settings in order to mask her other activities the intelligence activities became so much a part of her life that Wake was forced to rent another apartment away from her home so as not to bring suspicion on her husband, his family or their business as a cover for renting another property she had to pretend that it was intended to be used by her and a lover and thus kept a secret her husband was greatly amused by November of 1942 the Nazis marched into unoccupied France and the Gestapo first began talking about the White Mouse a moniker that they had given to Wake in lieu of her identity she continually eluded capture only adding to the Gestapo's frustration and the patience to discover her identity by 1943 she had become the Gestapo's most wanted with a 5 million franc price on her head the year her circuit was betrayed she had to escape incarceration and she was forced to flee to England on foot via the Pyrenees mountain her husband, Henri stayed behind he was later captured tortured and executed by the Gestapo because he would not betray her until the war ended she was unaware of her husband's death and she subsequently blamed herself for it once in Britain though she again volunteered herself for service and she ended up being recruited by none other than the SOE once she began her training Vera Adkins who was one of the leaders recalled that Wake put the men to shame by her cheerful spirit and strength of character Wake described her own tactics like this a little powder and a little drink on the way and I'd pass a German post at Wake and say do you want to search me? God, what a flirtatious little bastard I was in 1944 Wake was parachuted into France and she was supposed to become a liaison between London and the local Monty group that was headed by Captain Henri Tardemot in the Forest of Tronquet upon discovering her tangled in a tree in her parachute Captain Tardemot greeted her remarking I hope that all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year to which she replied don't give me that French shit once back in France her duties included distributing weapons and equipment as well as managing the organization's finances Wake also helped to lead attacks on German hotspots such as the local Gestapo headquarters in Montlusson in that mission alone 38 Germans were killed she herself killed a sentry with her bare hands to stop him from raising the alarm during the raid speaking about this abrupt execution Wake recalled they taught this judo chop stuff with the flat of the hand at the SOE and I practiced away at it but this was the only time I used it whack and it killed him all right I was really surprised after the death of a section leader over the McKee French resistance group and she ended up leading more than 7500 men at one point Wake discovered that her men were protecting a girl who was a German spy they didn't have the heart to kill her in cold blood but when Wake insisted that she would perform the execution herself they capitulated on another occasion to replace the coach her wireless operator had been forced to destroy in a German raid Wake rode a bicycle for more than 190 miles through several German checkpoints to get to another group's wireless operator and send a message to London to apprise them of the situation unfortunately when she got there after that 190 mile bike ride she couldn't convince the operator that she was with the SOE so she finally searched out a different local McKee group who finally sent her message Wake then had to ride the bike back to where she started and she did all of this in 72 hours at war's end she had earned more decorations than any other British service woman before her as a musician and a teacher of Sufism which was Amina Begum who was originally an aura ray baker who was an American from Albuquerque, New Mexico who met in Iyat Khan during his travels in the United States in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I the family left Russia for London and they lived in Bloomsbury actually and I happened to have lived there myself in 2015 in 1920 they moved to France settling near Paris but after the death of her father in 1927 Nor took on the responsibility for her grief-stricken mother and her younger siblings as a young girl she was described as quiet, shy, sensitive and dreamy she studied child psychology at the Sorbonne and music at the Paris Conservatory and composed for the harp and the piano she began a career writing poetry and children's stories and she became a regular contributor to children's magazines and front radio in 1939 her book, The Twenty Jataka Tales inspired by the Jataka Tales of Buddhist tradition was published in London after the outbreak of the Second World War when France was overrun by German troops the family fled to Bordeaux and from there by sea to England although Nor was deeply influenced by the pacifist teachings of her father she decided to help defeat Nazi tyranny in November of 1940 she joined the women's auxiliary air force later Nor was recruited to join the SOV as a wireless operator in occupied territory she would be the first woman sent over in that capacity and all the other women agents before her had been sent over as couriers having had previous wire telegraphy training she had an edge on those who were just beginning their radio training and she was both fast and accurate the ultimate exercise she had to endure in order to be able to go out into the field was Amok Gestapo interrogation and it was intended to give agents a taste of what might be in store for them if they were captured as well as give them some practice in maintaining the recovered story her escaping officer found her interrogation almost unbearable and reported that she seemed terrified so overwhelmed that she nearly lost her voice and then afterwards she was trembling and quite blanched her finishing report which the official historian of the F which stands for France section of the SOE found in her personal file long after the war read not overburdened with brains but has worked hard and shown keenness apart from some dislike of the security side of the course she is an unstable and temperamental personality and it's very doubtful whether she's really suited to work in the field next to this comment, Maurice Buckmaster who was the head of the F section had written in the margin, nonsense and we don't want them overburdened with brains her superiors held mixed opinions on her suitability for secret warfare and her training ended up being incomplete due to the need to get those wireless telegraphy operators into the field her childlike qualities particularly her gentle manner and her lack of ruse had greatly worried her instructors at the training schools one instructor even wrote that she confesses that she would not like to have to do anything too faced her mission would be an especially dangerous one so successful had female carriers been that the decision was then made to use them as wireless operators as well which was even more dangerous work probably the most dangerous work of all the job of the operator was to maintain a link circuit in the field and London and they would send and receive messages about planned sabotage operations or about where arms were needed for resistance fighters without that communication it was almost impossible for any resistance strategy to be coordinated for the operators were highly vulnerable to detection which was improving as the war progressed in 1943 an operator's life expectancy in the field was six weeks after her network was betrayed she was the only one to escape she managed for months to avoid capture living on the Ronin with no one to turn to in an attempt to disguise herself she dyed her hair red in the end however she was captured on October 13th 1943 she was arrested and interrogated during her detainment she tried to escape twice guards testified after the war that she did not give the Gestapo a single piece of information but lied consistently a month after being captured Khan along with fellow SOE agents John Renshaw Starr and Leon Fay escaped but they were recaptured as there was an air raid alert as they escaped across the roof regulations for an air raid required a prisoner count at those kinds of times and so their escape was discovered before they could get away after refusing to sign a declaration renouncing any future escape attempts she was taken to Germany for safe custody and she was imprisoned in solitary confinement in complete secrecy for ten months she was kept there shackled at the hands and the feet she became classified as highly dangerous and she remained uncooperative and continued to refuse to give any information on her work or her fellow operatives although in her despair of the appalling nature of her confinement other prisoners could hear her crying at night nor was abruptly transferred to Dachau concentration camp with fellow agents Yolanda Beekman Madeleine Downerman and Eliani Plouman there are two theories for Nor's execution the first is that the following morning after they arrived to Dachau September 13th the four women were made to kneel together and were executed a single shot to the head but testimony of other Dachau prisoners suggests that while the other three were executed together Nor was kept alive at extra night in which the guards viciously raped and beat her most likely because of her Indian heritage she too was shot in the head from behind but before her murder her last word was liberty SOV agents who were brought to Knott's Fyler camp to be secretly executed and four women SOV agents taken to Dachau to be secretly executed the alleged executions of these women was top secret so secret that there was no written execution order and no records kept of their death and even to this day nothing has been found the logical place to send the women would have been the Ravensbrook camp which was the only all-female concentration camp in Germany or used by the Nazi party near Berlin and it's where they could have been executed in their bodies disposed of in the crematorium the women that were allegedly killed at Knott's Fyler were Andre Burrell and Sonya Olszanecki spies that were executed at Ravensbrook and those included Denise Block these 12 women who were executed a heinous crime had the women committed that was worse than anything that the male SOV agents had ever done eight women taken to Knott's Fyler and Dachau both camps for only men to be secretly executed instead of being taken to Ravensbrook the camp for women why were four women SOV agents at Ravensbrook executed in the middle of a typhus epidemic six months after they were brought to the camp the organizers of the SOV were all men while the couriers were almost all women in other words the women were low ranking members of the SOV while the men had far more important positions this makes it even harder to understand why the women who were just following the orders of the men were executed while the majority of the men were spared why had the Germans left no official documentation of these executions although it was not a violation of the Geneva Convention to execute spies who were not military uniform when captured you see the German military command had decreed that men helping or hiding allied servicemen on the run would be executed women would be deported to the camps and the reward for denouncing them was 10,000 prompts if the decree of the German military command had been followed male spies captured should have been shot or hanged and the women should have been sent to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrook instead, while all spies became Nacht und Nebel prisoners while under another decree that was issued by Hitler himself the men were imprisoned while the women who worked below them were executed so the Nacht und Nebel prisoners were made to disappear into the Nacht und Fog so that their families would think that they were dead they weren't allowed to stand or receive letters and their families weren't notified if they died while in captivity the purpose of this was to discourage resistance Knott's father was one of the main camps where the NNN prisoners were sent by the Gestapo female NNN prisoners were mostly sent to Ravensbrook until Sonya Alshaneski, who is one of the women I showed you was finally identified as the fourth Knott's Fyler victim it was actually assumed that more NNK had been executed at Knott's Fyler because if you notice, they look remarkably similar when Vera Adkins found the record of Sonya Alshaneski's imprisonment at Karlsruhe, which was a French prison before she got sent to Knott's Fyler she assumed that this was an alias for NNK who fit the description of one of the women that a male agent imprisoned at the camp and who was spared, had given her Sonya Alshaneski had been recruited by a different agent connected to the network in the spring of 1942 out in the fields, she was French and so there was actually no record of her in the SOE files until that point Madeline Dharmament was a courier she was captured on the day she landed as she landed she was seized she had done nothing and knew nothing so why was she executed? Eliani Plouman was a courier as well and she wasn't even involved in any of the very famous radio games that we see all these movies about Yolanda Biedman was pregnant when she left for France to go to work as a wireless operator and that is according to her mother's official statement entered into the official records of the SOE pregnant prisoners were usually sent to Ravensbrook so the question remains why were these women treated so harshly? why were they treated like men? my theory is that these women were treated even more harshly than men and that it was because the Germans considered them to be like men these women were far outside the comfortable societal roles in Britain so you can only imagine how far out of their comfort zone German men would have been while dealing with these strong women German women at the time were supposed to be at home taking care of the family to fall in line with their husband's wishes these women were anything but compliant in their men, these women, doing men's work and doing it successfully at that could only be because they themselves were more masculine than feminine in nature however these strong women ended up being treated even more harshly than women because the German officials were scared of these strong women they resented them, feared them even they came to hate female spies more than the men which caused them to beat and isolate and rape these women to treat them far more harshly for their defiance of the social order a concept incredibly important to the Nazis these women were punished while the men lived these women died sent to all male concentration camps and their records destroyed so that they could disappear from history as records and no one might know how the Nazi social order had been threatened by a few brave women because of the lack of records we may never actually have concrete evidence that these women were executed and believe me, I've tried I've dug through archives and tried my best to find something but most historians do recognize that these women were even Dahau itself has a small memorial in place to commemorate these women Vera Adkins who was the assistant head of the F-section of the SOE pushed to have a memorial created at Dahau by the British to honor these women for their service at the last minute the funding was pulled and the monument was never built this was likely due to the fact that the British didn't want to recognize or highlight these women's contributions women had never been intended to be used in combat it defied conventions, societal standards and even international law to do so and despite giving the ultimate sacrifice these women's service were left in the night and fall to be forgotten but this war was won by un-gentlemanly warfare and after all who could be more suited to un-gentlemanly warfare than a woman if the memorial had been built this is the inscription that Adkins had chosen to be etched upon it a short poem by Walt Whitman after the dazzle of the day is gone only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars after the clanger of organ majestic or chorus or perfect band silent, a thorn my soul moves the symphony true