Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, (, ; 1 May 1908Jan Larecki, Krystyna Skarbek: agentka o wielu twarzach (Krystyna Skarbek: Agent with Many Faces), 2008, pp. 31, 123. – 15 June 1952), also known as Christine Granville, was a Polish agent of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. She became celebrated for her daring exploits in intelligence and irregular-warfare missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France. Journalist Alistair Horne, who described himself in 2012 as one of the few people still alive who had known Skarbek, called her the "bravest of the brave".Horne, Alistair (2012), "Bravest of the Brave," The Spectator,, accessed 23 Jan 2020 Spymaster Vera Atkins of the SOE described Skarbek as "very brave, very attractive, but a loner and a law unto herself".
She became a British agent months before the SOE was founded in July 1940. She was the first female agent of the British to serve in the field, and the longest-serving of all Britain's wartime women agents. Her resourcefulness and success have been credited with influencing the organisation's decision to recruit more women as agents in Nazi-occupied countries. In 1941 she began using the alias Christine Granville, a name she legally adopted upon naturalisation as a British subject in December 1946. Naturalisation. "Gizycka, Krystyna (known as Christine Granville); Poland; Crown Service; c/o General Headquarters, Middle East, Cairo. 17 December 1946."
Skarbek's most famous exploit was securing the release of SOE agents Francis Cammaerts and Xan Fielding from a German prison hours before they were to be executed. She did so by meeting (at great personal risk) with the Gestapo commander in Digne-les-Bains, France, telling him she was a British agent, and persuading him with threats, lies, and a two million franc bribe to release them. The event is fictionalised in the last episode of the British television show Wish Me Luck.
Skarbek is often characterised in terms such as Britain's "most glamorous spy"Garmen, Emma, "World War II's Most Glamorous Spy," , accessed 3 January 2020 or "Churchill's favourite spy". She was stabbed to death in 1952 in London by an obsessed and spurned suitor who was subsequently hanged.
Early life
Krystyna Skarbek was born in 1908 in Warsaw,Four different places have been cited as her birthplace. According to Larecki, her true birthplace was the home of her Goldfeder grandparents at ulica Zielna 45 in Warsaw. Larecki, Krystyna Skarbek, pp. 32–34. the second child of Count Jerzy Skarbek,It has been alleged that her father's branch of the Skarbek family had not obtained confirmation of the title of count in the 19th century from the Russian Imperial court. Ronald Nowicki, "Krystyna Skarbek: A Letter", The Polish Review, vol. L, no. 1 (2005), p. 100. a Roman Catholic, and Stefania (née Goldfeder), the daughter of a wealthy assimilated Jewish family. Marrying Stefania in late December 1899, Jerzy Skarbek used his wife's dowry (her father was a banker) to pay his debts and continue his lavish lifestyle.
Notable relations included Fryderyk Skarbek, prison reformer, and Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski, United States Union general.Jarosław Krawczyk, "Wielkie odkrycia ludzkości. Nr 17", Rzeczpospolita, 12 June 2008. Skarbek was distantly related to the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, as a cousin from the Lwów side of the family had married a relative of Horthy.Ronald Nowicki, "Krystyna Skarbek: a Letter", The Polish Review, vol. L, no. 1 (2005), p. 99. Christopher Kasparek, letter to the editor, The Polish Review, vol. L, no. 2 (2005), pp. 253–255.
Krystyna took after her father and his liking for riding horses, which she sat astride rather than side-saddle as was usual for women. She also became an expert skier during visits to Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains of southern Poland. At the family stables, she met Andrzej Kowerski, whose father had brought him over to play with ten-year-old Krystyna while he and her father discussed agricultural matters.
The 1920s left the family in straitened financial circumstances, and they had to give up their country estate and move to Warsaw. In 1930, when she was 22, Count Jerzy died. The Goldfeder financial empire had almost completely collapsed, and there was barely enough money to support the widowed Countess Stefania. Krystyna, not wishing to be a burden to her mother, worked at a Fiat car dealership, but soon became ill from automobile fumes and had to give up the job. At first she was thought, on the basis of shadows on her chest x-rays, to be suffering from tuberculosis, which had killed her father. She received compensation from her employer's insurance company and took her physicians' advice to lead as much of an open-air life as she could. She began spending a great deal of time hiking and skiing the Tatra Mountains. In 1930, she was a runner up in the Miss Poland beauty contest.
On 21 April 1930, she married a young businessman, Gustaw Gettlich, at the Spiritual Seminary Church in Warsaw. They proved incompatible, and the marriage soon ended without rancour. A subsequent love affair came to naught when the young man's mother refused to consider the penniless divorcée as a potential daughter-in-law.
One day, she lost control on a Zakopane ski slope and was saved by Jerzy Giżycki, who stepped into her path and stopped her descent. Giżycki came from a wealthy family in Kamieniec Podolski (formerly Poland, at the time the Soviet Union). 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. He knew Africa well and hoped one day to return there. The two were married on 2 November 1938 at the Evangelical Reformed Church in Warsaw.M. Masson, Christine, p. 24. Soon after, he accepted a diplomatic posting to Ethiopia, where he served as Poland's consul general until September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. She 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."
World War II
London
Upon the outbreak of World War II, the couple sailed for London, arriving 6 October 1939, where Skarbek 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 (SIS). The first SIS mention of her was in December 1939. She was described as a "flaming Polish patriot, expert skier, and great adventuress" and "absolutely fearless".
Hungary and Poland From London Skarbek, now a British agent, journeyed to Budapest, Hungary, arriving on 21 December 1939. Hungary was not yet a participant in World War II, but was leaning toward Nazi Germany. Skarbek's cover story for her presence in Hungary was that she was a journalist.
She persuaded Polish Olympic skier Jan Marusarz, brother of Nordic skier Stanisław Marusarz, to escort her across the snow-covered Tatra Mountains into Nazi-occupied Poland. Arriving in Warsaw, she pleaded vainly with her mother to leave Poland. Stefania Skarbek refused; she was determined to stay in Warsaw to continue teaching French to small children. In January 1942, Stefania was arrested by the Germans as a Jew and disappeared into Warsaw's Pawiak prison. The prison had been designed in the mid-19th century by Skarbek's great-great-uncle Fryderyk Skarbek, a prison reformer and Frédéric Chopin's godfather, who had been tutored in the French language by Chopin's father.
In February 1940, while working in her occupied homeland, she was hailed at a cafe in Warsaw by a woman acquaintance: "Krystyna! Krystyna Skarbek! What are you doing here? We heard that you'd gone abroad!" When Skarbek denied that was her name, the woman found her denial hard to believe. To minimise suspicion, Skarbek tarried a while before leaving the café.
In Hungary, Skarbek encountered Andrzej Kowerski (1912–1988), now a Polish army officer, who later used the British nom de guerre "Andrew Kennedy". Skarbek 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.
Skarbek helped organise a system of Polish couriers who brought intelligence reports from Warsaw to Budapest. Kowerski (Kennedy)'s cousin, Ludwik Popiel, managed to smuggle out a unique Polish anti-tank rifle, model 35, with the stock and barrel sawn off for easier transport. Skarbek, for a time, concealed it in her Budapest apartment. 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.
At the request of MI6, she and Kowerski organised surveillance of all the rail, road and river traffic on the borders with Romania and Germany. She is credited with providing intelligence on oil transports to Germany from Romania's Ploiesti oilfields.
Skarbek spent 1940 travelling back and forth between Poland and Hungary. In Budapest, in January 1941, she and Kowerski were arrested by the Hungarian police and imprisoned and questioned by the Gestapo. She feigned symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis by biting her tongue until it bled and a doctor diagnosed her incorrectly with terminal tuberculosis. The Germans released them, but the couple was followed by the police afterwards and they decided to flee Hungary, a German ally.
Car journey The British Ambassador in Hungary, Owen O'Malley, and his wife, the novelist Ann Bridge, undertook to help Skarbek and Kowerski escape Hungary. O'Malley issued British passports to them. Kowerski became "Anthony Kennedy", and Skarbek became "Christine Granville", a name she used for the rest of her life. She also shaved seven years off her age; her passport gave her birth date as 1915. A British Embassy driver smuggled Skarbek out of Hungary and into Yugoslavia in the trunk of O'Malley's Chrysler. Kowerski, a.k.a. Kennedy, drove his Opel across the border. The couple reunited in Yugoslavia and O'Malley joined them later in Belgrade, where they enjoyed a few days of "drinking champagne in ... nightclubs and belly-dancing bars". In late February, Skarbek and Kowerski continued their journey in the Opel, first to Sofia, Bulgaria. Sofia's best hotel "was full of Nazis". Skarbek and Kowerski called at the British Legation, meeting with air attaché Aidan Crawley. The couple gave Crawley rolls of microfilm which they had received from a Polish intelligence organisation called the "Musketeers". The microfilm contained photos of a German military buildup near the border with the Soviet Union, indicating that a German invasion of the Soviet Union was being planned. The microfilm was sent to Prime Minister Winston Churchill in London, who could scarcely believe it; but by March, with information from other sources, the Prime Minister was persuaded that Skarbek and Kowerski's intelligence was accurate. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.