Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, daughter of Count Jerzy Skarbek and Stefania Goldfeder, was born on 1 May 1908 in Poland. She died on 15 Jun 1952 in London, England.
She married first to a young businessman, Karol Getlich. But they were incompatible and the marriage soon ended without rancour. A subsequent love affair came to naught when the young man's mother refused to consider a penniless divorcee as a potential daughter-in-law.
One day, on a Zakopane ski slope, Krystyna lost control and was saved by a giant of a man who stepped into her path and stopped her descent. Her rescuer was Jerzy Giżycki, a brilliant, moody, irascible eccentric, who came from a wealthy family in Ukraine. At fourteen, he had quarrelled with his father, run away from home and worked in the United States as a cowboy and gold prospector. He eventually became an author and travelled the world in search of material for his books and articles.
On 2 Nov 1938, Krystyna and Jerzy married 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. Krystyna 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 2 Nov 1938, Krystyna and Jerzy married 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. Krystyna 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."
ALSO KNOWN AS:
Christine Granville
Christine Granville
Madame Pauline
Pauline Armand
Upon the outbreak of World War II, the couple sailed for London, England, where Krystyna sought to offer her services in the struggle against the common enemy. The British authorities showed little interest but were eventually convinced by her acquaintances, including journalist Frederick Augustus Voigt, who introduced her to the Secret Intelligence Service.
She went to Hungary and, in December 1939, persuaded Polish Olympic skier Jan Marusarz, brother of Stanisław Marusarz, to escort her across the snow-covered Tatra Mountains into Poland. Arriving in Warsaw, she pleaded with her mother to leave Nazi-occupied Poland. Stefania Skarbek refused and died at the hands of the occupying Germans in Warsaw's Pawiak prison. Ironically, the prison had been designed in the mid-19th century by Krystyna Skarbek's great-great-uncle Fryderyk Florian Skarbek, a prison reformer and Frédéric Chopin's namesake and godfather, who had been tutored in French language by Chopin's father.
An incident that probably dates to Krystyna's first visit 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 she 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, to minimize suspicion, Krystyna tarried a while before leaving the café.
Krystyna helped organize a system of Polish couriers who brought intelligence reports from Warsaw to Budapest. Andrzej Kowerski's cousin Ludwik Popiel managed to smuggle out the unique Polish anti-tank rifle, model 35, with the stock and barrel sawed off for easier transport. Krystyna concealed it in her Budapest apartment for a time. 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.
In Hungary, Krystyna met a Polish army officer, Andrzej Kowerski, who would later use the British nom de guerre "Andrew Kennedy". She 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.
Krystyne showed her penchant for stratagem when she and Kowerski were arrested by the Gestapo in January 1941; she won their release, feigning symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis by biting her tongue until it bled.
Upon their arrival at SOE offices in Cairo, Egypt they were shocked to learn they were under suspicion because of her contacts with a Polish intelligence organization called the "Musketeers". This group had been formed in October 1939 by engineer-inventor Stefan Witkowski, who was assassinated by parties unknown in October 1942. 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.
In the meantime, Germany had started Operation Barbarossa, an invasion of the Soviet Union (22 Jun 1941), as Krystyna's intelligence obtained from the Musketeers had predicted. It is now known that advance information about Operation Barbarossa had also been provided by a number of other sources, including Ultra.
When Krystyna'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. They were formally divorced at the Polish consulate in Berlin on 1 August 1946. Krystyna was sidelined from mainstream action. Vera Atkins, assistant to the head of F Section, later described Skarbek as a very brave woman, but a law unto herself and a loner.
Her situation changed greatly in 1944, with a turn of events that would lead to some of her most famous exploits. Fluent in French, she was offered to SOE's teams in France, under the nom de guerre "Madame Pauline". The offer was timely: SOE was running short of trained operatives to cover the increased demands being placed on it in the run-up to the invasion of France. New operatives were already in training, but the work took time. If inserted into occupied Europe before they had absorbed the numerous physical and intellectual skills required for survival, the operatives could compromise not only themselves but their SOE colleagues already in place and French Resistance members.
Krystyna had a track record of successful courier work in occupied Europe and would need only a little "refresher" work and some guidance about working in France. There was one particular need that required urgent attention: the replacement of a lost courier on a busy circuit that would be among the first to meet the proposed Allied landings. She was, therefore, chosen to replace SOE agent Cecily Lefort, who had been captured, tortured and imprisoned by the Gestapo.
The SOE had several branches working in France. Though most of the women in France answered to F Section in London, Skarbek's mission was launched from Algiers, the base of AMF Section. This factor, combined with Krystyna's absence from the usual SOE training program, sometimes intrigues researchers. AMF Section was only set up in the wake of Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa, partly with staff from London (F Section) and partly with staff from Cairo.
AMF Section served three purposes: (1) it was simpler and safer to run the resupply operations from Allied North Africa than from London, across German-occupied France; (2) since the South of France would be liberated by separate Allied landings there (Operation Dragoon), SOE units in the area needed to be transferred to have links with those headquarters, not with forces for Normandy; (3) AMF Section tapped into the skills of the French in North Africa, who did not generally support Charles de Gaulle and who had been linked with opposition in the former "Unoccupied Zone".
After the two invasions, the distinctions became irrelevant, and almost all the SOE Sections in France would be united with the maquis into the Forces Francaises de l'Interieur. [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.] Krystyna, as "Pauline Armand", parachuted into southeastern France on 6 July 1944 and became part of the Jockey network directed by a Belgian-British lapsed pacifist, Francis Cammaerts. She assisted Cammaerts by linking Italian partisans and French Maquis for joint operations against the Germans in the Alps and by inducing non-Germans, especially conscripted Poles, in the German occupation forces to defect to the Allies.
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. Krystyna, learning that they were to be executed, managed to meet with Capt. Albert Schenck, an Alsatian who acted as liaison officer between the local French prefecture and the Gestapo. She introduced herself as a niece of British General Bernard Montgomery and threatened Schenck with terrible retribution if harm came to the prisoners. She reinforced the threat with a mercenary appeal—an offer of two million francs for the men's release. Schenck in turn introduced her to a Gestapo officer, a Belgian named Max Waem.
For three hours she argued and bargained with him and, having turned the full force of her magnetic personality on him, told him that the Allies would be arriving at any moment and that she, a British parachutist, was in constant wireless contact with the British forces. To make her point, she produced some broken, useless W/T crystals.
'If I were you,' said Krystyna, 'I should give careful thought to the proposition I have made you. As I told Capitaine Schenck, if anything should happen to my husband (as she falsely described Cammaerts) or to his friends, the reprisals would be swift and terrible, for I don't have to tell you that both you and the Capitaine have an infamous reputation among the locals.'
Increasingly alarmed by the thought of what might befall him when the Allies and the Resistance decided to avenge the many murders he had committed, Waem struck the butt end of his revolver on the table and said, 'If I do get them out of prison, what will you do to protect me?'
After Cammaerts and the other two men were released, Captain Schenck was advised to leave Digne. He did not and was subsequently murdered by a person or persons unknown. His wife kept the bribe money and, after the war, attempted to exchange it for new francs. She was arrested, but was released after the authorities investigated her story. She was able to exchange the money for only a tiny portion of its value.
Krystyna's service in France restored her political reputation and greatly enhanced her military reputation. When the SOE teams returned from France (or in some cases, were given 24 hours to depart by de Gaulle), some of the British women sought new missions in the Pacific War, since the Empire of Japan still held on; but Krystyna, as a Pole, was ideally placed to serve as a courier for missions to her homeland in the final missions of SOE. 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 Krystyna were now fully reconciled with the Polish forces and were preparing to be dropped into Poland in early 1945. In the event, the mission, called Operation Freston, was canceled 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 (FANY), officially part of the Auxiliary Territorial Service though a very elite and autonomous part, or the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Skarbek appears to have been a member of both.
In preparation for her service in France, she appears to have been with FANY. On her return, she seems to have transferred to the WAAF as an officer until the end of the war in Europe ... 21 Nov 1944 to 14 May 1945.
Krystyna was one of the few SOE female field agents promoted beyond subaltern rank to captain, or the Air Force equivalent: flight officer, the WAAF counterpart of the flight lieutenant rank for male officers. Like Pearl Witherington, the courier who had taken command of a group when the designated commander was captured, and Yvonne Cormeau, the most successful wireless operator, she ended the war as honorary flight officers.
A few weeks after the armistice, Krystyna Skarbek was dismissed with a month's salary and left in Cairo to fend for herself. Although she was too proud to ask for any other assistance, she did apply for a British passport; for ever since the Anglo-American betrayal of her country at Yalta she had been virtually stateless. But the naturalization papers were delayed in the normal bureaucratic manner. Meanwhile, abandoning all hope of security, she deliberately embarked on a life of uncertain travel, as though anxious to reproduce in peace time the hazards she had known during the war; until, finally, in June 1952, in the lobby of a cheap London hotel, the menial existence to which she had been reduced by penury was ended by an assassin's knife.
Krystyna was stabbed to death in the Shelbourne Hotel, Earls Court, in London, England, on 15 Jun 1952. She had commenced work as a liner stewardess 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 the Winchester Castle. Her body was identified by her cousin, Andrzej Skarbek. Her assailant was Dennis Muldowney, an obsessed Reform Club porter and former merchant marine steward whose advances she had previously rejected. After being tried and convicted of her murder, Muldowney was hanged on the gallows at HMP Pentonville on 30 Sep 1952.
Upon the outbreak of World War II, the couple sailed for London, England, where Krystyna sought to offer her services in the struggle against the common enemy. The British authorities showed little interest but were eventually convinced by her acquaintances, including journalist Frederick Augustus Voigt, who introduced her to the Secret Intelligence Service.
She went to Hungary and, in December 1939, persuaded Polish Olympic skier Jan Marusarz, brother of Stanisław Marusarz, to escort her across the snow-covered Tatra Mountains into Poland. Arriving in Warsaw, she pleaded with her mother to leave Nazi-occupied Poland. Stefania Skarbek refused and died at the hands of the occupying Germans in Warsaw's Pawiak prison. Ironically, the prison had been designed in the mid-19th century by Krystyna Skarbek's great-great-uncle Fryderyk Florian Skarbek, a prison reformer and Frédéric Chopin's namesake and godfather, who had been tutored in French language by Chopin's father.
An incident that probably dates to Krystyna's first visit 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 she 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, to minimize suspicion, Krystyna tarried a while before leaving the café.
Krystyna helped organize a system of Polish couriers who brought intelligence reports from Warsaw to Budapest. Andrzej Kowerski's cousin Ludwik Popiel managed to smuggle out the unique Polish anti-tank rifle, model 35, with the stock and barrel sawed off for easier transport. Krystyna concealed it in her Budapest apartment for a time. 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.
In Hungary, Krystyna met a Polish army officer, Andrzej Kowerski, who would later use the British nom de guerre "Andrew Kennedy". She 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.
Krystyne showed her penchant for stratagem when she and Kowerski were arrested by the Gestapo in January 1941; she won their release, feigning symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis by biting her tongue until it bled.
Upon their arrival at SOE offices in Cairo, Egypt they were shocked to learn they were under suspicion because of her contacts with a Polish intelligence organization called the "Musketeers". This group had been formed in October 1939 by engineer-inventor Stefan Witkowski, who was assassinated by parties unknown in October 1942. 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.
In the meantime, Germany had started Operation Barbarossa, an invasion of the Soviet Union (22 Jun 1941), as Krystyna's intelligence obtained from the Musketeers had predicted. It is now known that advance information about Operation Barbarossa had also been provided by a number of other sources, including Ultra.
When Krystyna'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. They were formally divorced at the Polish consulate in Berlin on 1 August 1946. Krystyna was sidelined from mainstream action. Vera Atkins, assistant to the head of F Section, later described Skarbek as a very brave woman, but a law unto herself and a loner.
Her situation changed greatly in 1944, with a turn of events that would lead to some of her most famous exploits. Fluent in French, she was offered to SOE's teams in France, under the nom de guerre "Madame Pauline". The offer was timely: SOE was running short of trained operatives to cover the increased demands being placed on it in the run-up to the invasion of France. New operatives were already in training, but the work took time. If inserted into occupied Europe before they had absorbed the numerous physical and intellectual skills required for survival, the operatives could compromise not only themselves but their SOE colleagues already in place and French Resistance members.
Krystyna had a track record of successful courier work in occupied Europe and would need only a little "refresher" work and some guidance about working in France. There was one particular need that required urgent attention: the replacement of a lost courier on a busy circuit that would be among the first to meet the proposed Allied landings. She was, therefore, chosen to replace SOE agent Cecily Lefort, who had been captured, tortured and imprisoned by the Gestapo.
The SOE had several branches working in France. Though most of the women in France answered to F Section in London, Skarbek's mission was launched from Algiers, the base of AMF Section. This factor, combined with Krystyna's absence from the usual SOE training program, sometimes intrigues researchers. AMF Section was only set up in the wake of Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa, partly with staff from London (F Section) and partly with staff from Cairo.
AMF Section served three purposes: (1) it was simpler and safer to run the resupply operations from Allied North Africa than from London, across German-occupied France; (2) since the South of France would be liberated by separate Allied landings there (Operation Dragoon), SOE units in the area needed to be transferred to have links with those headquarters, not with forces for Normandy; (3) AMF Section tapped into the skills of the French in North Africa, who did not generally support Charles de Gaulle and who had been linked with opposition in the former "Unoccupied Zone".
After the two invasions, the distinctions became irrelevant, and almost all the SOE Sections in France would be united with the maquis into the Forces Francaises de l'Interieur. [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.] Krystyna, as "Pauline Armand", parachuted into southeastern France on 6 July 1944 and became part of the Jockey network directed by a Belgian-British lapsed pacifist, Francis Cammaerts. She assisted Cammaerts by linking Italian partisans and French Maquis for joint operations against the Germans in the Alps and by inducing non-Germans, especially conscripted Poles, in the German occupation forces to defect to the Allies.
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. Krystyna, learning that they were to be executed, managed to meet with Capt. Albert Schenck, an Alsatian who acted as liaison officer between the local French prefecture and the Gestapo. She introduced herself as a niece of British General Bernard Montgomery and threatened Schenck with terrible retribution if harm came to the prisoners. She reinforced the threat with a mercenary appeal—an offer of two million francs for the men's release. Schenck in turn introduced her to a Gestapo officer, a Belgian named Max Waem.
For three hours she argued and bargained with him and, having turned the full force of her magnetic personality on him, told him that the Allies would be arriving at any moment and that she, a British parachutist, was in constant wireless contact with the British forces. To make her point, she produced some broken, useless W/T crystals.
'If I were you,' said Krystyna, 'I should give careful thought to the proposition I have made you. As I told Capitaine Schenck, if anything should happen to my husband (as she falsely described Cammaerts) or to his friends, the reprisals would be swift and terrible, for I don't have to tell you that both you and the Capitaine have an infamous reputation among the locals.'
Increasingly alarmed by the thought of what might befall him when the Allies and the Resistance decided to avenge the many murders he had committed, Waem struck the butt end of his revolver on the table and said, 'If I do get them out of prison, what will you do to protect me?'
After Cammaerts and the other two men were released, Captain Schenck was advised to leave Digne. He did not and was subsequently murdered by a person or persons unknown. His wife kept the bribe money and, after the war, attempted to exchange it for new francs. She was arrested, but was released after the authorities investigated her story. She was able to exchange the money for only a tiny portion of its value.
Krystyna's service in France restored her political reputation and greatly enhanced her military reputation. When the SOE teams returned from France (or in some cases, were given 24 hours to depart by de Gaulle), some of the British women sought new missions in the Pacific War, since the Empire of Japan still held on; but Krystyna, as a Pole, was ideally placed to serve as a courier for missions to her homeland in the final missions of SOE. 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 Krystyna were now fully reconciled with the Polish forces and were preparing to be dropped into Poland in early 1945. In the event, the mission, called Operation Freston, was canceled 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 (FANY), officially part of the Auxiliary Territorial Service though a very elite and autonomous part, or the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Skarbek appears to have been a member of both.
In preparation for her service in France, she appears to have been with FANY. On her return, she seems to have transferred to the WAAF as an officer until the end of the war in Europe ... 21 Nov 1944 to 14 May 1945.
Krystyna was one of the few SOE female field agents promoted beyond subaltern rank to captain, or the Air Force equivalent: flight officer, the WAAF counterpart of the flight lieutenant rank for male officers. Like Pearl Witherington, the courier who had taken command of a group when the designated commander was captured, and Yvonne Cormeau, the most successful wireless operator, she ended the war as honorary flight officers.
A few weeks after the armistice, Krystyna Skarbek was dismissed with a month's salary and left in Cairo to fend for herself. Although she was too proud to ask for any other assistance, she did apply for a British passport; for ever since the Anglo-American betrayal of her country at Yalta she had been virtually stateless. But the naturalization papers were delayed in the normal bureaucratic manner. Meanwhile, abandoning all hope of security, she deliberately embarked on a life of uncertain travel, as though anxious to reproduce in peace time the hazards she had known during the war; until, finally, in June 1952, in the lobby of a cheap London hotel, the menial existence to which she had been reduced by penury was ended by an assassin's knife.
Krystyna was stabbed to death in the Shelbourne Hotel, Earls Court, in London, England, on 15 Jun 1952. She had commenced work as a liner stewardess 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 the Winchester Castle. Her body was identified by her cousin, Andrzej Skarbek. Her assailant was Dennis Muldowney, an obsessed Reform Club porter and former merchant marine steward whose advances she had previously rejected. After being tried and convicted of her murder, Muldowney was hanged on the gallows at HMP Pentonville on 30 Sep 1952.
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