A wartime SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek is honoured with a photograph at the National Portrait Gallery in London as part of a new exhibition on female spies. Skarbek is considered one of the most outstanding spies of the World War 2 and the favourite SOE agent of Winston Churchill.
Maria Krystyna Skarbek was born on 1 May 1908 in Warsaw into a Polish-Jewish family.
She started her work with the British intelligence in 1939. Until 1941 she operated from Hungary, from where she travelled to occupied Poland and Slovakia.
Her unit was involved in organising escapes of Polish soldiers interned in Hungary for further service in the Polish armed forces in the West.
Later Skarbek worked in Yugoslavia. Until the autumn of 1941, she served as a secret courier with the British government agency SOE.
She was active in forming the resistance movement in France, where she was able to contact Polish soldiers forced to serve in the Wehrmacht and convinced 70 of them to desert.
In July 1944, after parachute training, she was redeployed as Pauline Armand and assisted French partisans on the Vercors plateau in southern France, where she organised a spy swap of several arrested heads of the sabotage-diversion network „Jockey” with the German security police Gestapo.
In June 1944 she was transferred to the SOE unit in Algiers.
She was demobilised in April 1945 in Cairo, receiving a severance package of just £100 along with personal thanks from the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Krystyna Skarbek is considered the longest-serving British spy during the World War 2 and one of the most successful.
On 15 June 1952, at London’s Shelbourne Hotel in Kensington, she was stabbed to death by a stalker, Dennis Muldowney. Skarbek died on the same day. Krystyna Skarbek-Giżycka was buried in St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green, north-west London.
Four years ago, thanks to the five-year campaign of Clare Mulley, an English heritage installed a blue plaque in London hotel on Lexham Gardens (then called the Shelbourne) to honour Krystyna.
If you are interested in Krystyna Skarbek’s life in detail you can read the biography of that famous spy written by Clare Mulley, called “The Spy Who Loved: the secrets and lives of one of Britain’s bravest wartime heroines”.
The exhibition „Secrets and spies: SOE women during the Second World War” at the Portrait Gallery will be open on Monday, 12 August 2024. Open daily. Free admission. The photo of Krystyna Skarbek was donated by the estate of Skarbek’s friend and SOE agent Willian Stanley Moss.
Photo: X/@NPGLondon, British Poles
Tomasz Modrzejewski
