Line, le journal des chics filles n° 196 (1960)
Line, le journal des chics filles n° 196 (1960)
Violette
Szabo
Born in Paris in 1921, to an English father, Charles Bushell, a taxi driver, and a French mother, Leroy her maiden name, a dressmaker, Violette learned the languages of Molière and Shakespeare at a very young age. Raised among four brothers, she was also very good at boys' games such as shooting, cycling and roller skating.
The family moved to England before WWII broke out, first to Liverpool and then to London. On 14th July 1940, as a good patriot, Mrs Bushell assigned her daughter Violette the task of inviting a French soldier to their family table. In Hyde Park, the young girl met an officer of the Foreign Legion, Etienne Szabo, a Hungarian-born who had joined General de Gaulle's troops. It is love at first sight and the marriage is celebrated the following August 21st. She was only 19 years old. But war quickly separated the young couple, who only saw each other on the occasion of Étienne's rare permissions. A daughter, Tania, will be the fruit of one of these rare reunions. Her father has to leave for Libya and dies at the battle of El Alamein, in Egypt, in October 1942.
Distraught, Violette decides to go to war by joining the SOE (Special Operations Executive), a secret service created by Wilston Churchill to support resistance movements in occupied Europe. After several months of training, in April 1944 she is sent on a mission to Rouen and Paris, under the identity of Corinne Leroy, to investigate whether it was possible to reactivate a network of 200 members wiped out by the Gestapo.
She was then repatriated to London but only stayed there for a month. During the night of 7 to 8th June 1944, she was parachuted with three other agents over Sussac (Haute-Vienne, France) ; her mission was to contact different local maquis and identify needs of French Resistance fighters.
While driving to a clandestine meeting with two resistance fighters, she came across a German roadblock at the entrance to the village of Salon-la-Tour. According to the most widespread version of this clash, gunfire broke out and Violette, wounded in the ankle, was finally made prisoner and taken to Limoges prison, where she was interrogated for several days. She was then transferred to the headquarters of the German Intelligence Service (the SD) in Paris. She was finally deported to the Ravensbruck camp, in Germany. It was here that she was executed, with a bullet in the back of the head, at the beginning of February 1945, together with two other SOE agents, two months before the liberation of the concentration camp.
Her daughter Tania was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the highest civilian honour, by King George VI. She was the first Englishwoman to receive this prestigious decoration.
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The detailed life of Violette Szabo can be found in many articles published on the internet. One of the most detailed is on Wikipedia.
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