lising the Sten guns they had with them would be found if they were searched, they began shooting at the Germans and during the ensuing exchange of gunfire, Violette was hit in the shoulder. She and Anastasie tried to flee through a cornfield — but the ankle she had sprained in parachute training gave way. So, insisting that Anastasie leave her behind, she saved his life by covering his escape with gunfire.
It was an astonishing display of courage. For half an hour, one young woman armed only with a Sten gun and 90 bullets managed to hold off at least 40 men equipped with machine guns and backed up by armoured vehicles. Even some of the Germans were impressed as, her ammunition finally spent, she waited calmly for them, hands at her sides, her gaze defiant.
An SS officer put a cigarette in her mouth. ‘Can’t help but respect your pluck, mademoiselle,’ he said, but she spat out the cigarette. Now she was only too happy for the Germans to know how much she despised them. It was a contempt she never hesitated to make clear in the remaining months of her life, starting with her interrogation by the Gestapo. One inquisitor offered her cups of tea and ‘English’ cake in an effort to charm information out of her. Others stripped her naked and sexually violated her, leaving her with terrible internal injuries.
Yet through all of this, Violette refused to talk. When she eventually did it was only because they had brought in a young Resistance fighter to be tortured in front of her, pulling out his nails and beating him almost to death until she offered what they later found was wholly useless information. Her last days were spent in Ravensbruck concentration camp, where each freezing morning the prisoners had to stand to attention for hours during roll-calls. Exhausted from breaking rocks all day on a diet of two cups of ‘soup’ — in reality just water and unwashed potato peelings — many prisoners threw themselves on the camp’s electric fence rather than face another day. But Violette’s spirit remained unbroken.
Violette Szabo's awards: George Cross (top), (left to right) 1939-45 Star, France and Germany Star, 1939-45 War Medal, French Croix de Guerre \ George Cross medal
During one roll-call, she stepped out of line and began singing and dancing to the old music-hall tune The Lambeth Walk. For this she was placed in solitary confinement for a week, listening to the screams of women being beaten or tortured, just as she had been after one of several attempts to escape. Even when she went to her death, taken to Ravensbruck’s ‘execution alley’ along with fellow SOE agents Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch, she kept her head held high and her expression scornful. As always, she had been what the citation for her George Cross called ‘a magnificent example of courage and steadfastness’.
Her name may not be familiar to modern generations but her legacy lives on in a poem much heard at funerals, which was written by SOE codemaster Leo Marks following the death of his girlfriend in an aeroplane crash. Used by Violette for her ‘poem code’ — an easily memorable verse used as the basis for encrypting messages — it was made famous when Virginia McKenna recited it over the end credits of Carve Her Name With Pride:
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have is yours
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours
and yours.