In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we’re joined by award-winning historian Clare Mulley, author of The Spy Who Loved..., The Women Who Flew for Hitler, and Agent Zo. We talk about Polish paratrooper Elżbieta Zawacka (Zo), Nazi-resisting test pilot Melitta von Stauffenberg, and the razor-sharp Christine Granville. Clare shares how she builds trust with her readers, balances storytelling with historical rigour, and restores women to their rightful place in the WWII record. And, this episode is full of stories about the heroic women Clare writes about. You'll want to pick up a book or two after this!
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Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm Marija.
And we like World War 2 media and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer.
Today we're joined by Claire Mulley, an award-winning
historian and biographer known for bringing to light the untold
(00:23):
stories of remarkable women in World War 2.
Her works include The Spy who Loved detailing the life of
Christina Skarbek or Christine Granville, Britain's first
female special agent, The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a dual
biography of German test pilots Hannah Reich and Melita von
Stauffenberg, and Agent Zoe, which follows the extraordinary
journey of Elschevira Zavatska, the only female member of
(00:44):
Poland's silent, unseen paratroopers.
Through meticulous research and compelling storytelling, Claire
sheds light on the complexities and courage of women in wartime.
Welcome, Claire, and thank you for being on our podcast.
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks very much for inviting me
on. First of all, Claire, I just
want to say congratulations on your recent award that you won.
(01:04):
Thank you. I got silver for Military
History magazine, Book of the Year 2025, which I'm absolutely
thrilled about, and also really excited because I'm shortlisted
for the women's prize for nonfiction this year, both for
Agent Zoe. So yes, fingers crossed for
that. But to be honest, it just feels
absolutely fantastic to be on the podium with either of those
(01:24):
wonderful prizes, so that's great.
That's really fun. Claire and I met very briefly
last year at We are Both Fest and and we didn't talk for very
long, but I did listen to your talk about Zoe since I have been
obsessed with her. She's awesome.
She is. I was wondering, and I'm sure
(01:44):
all my listeners are, because there aren't that many
biographies about women in WorldWar 2.
What brought you to them? How did you start telling their
stories? My first book was Slightly
Different, the book that broughtme into this.
It was a biography of a woman whose life was affected very
much by the First World War and she was a humanitarian.
(02:05):
She was absolutely fantastic, soinspiring.
After the First World War she was campaigning in Trafalgar
Square, traditional site of public protest for the then
Liberal government to end the economic blockade to Europe.
This was after the Armistice hadbeen signed but before peace was
formally declared. So they're doing the
negotiations at Versailles for the Treaty of Versailles.
And they had continued the economic blockade to Europe as a
(02:27):
way of pushing through harsher peace terms really.
And she knew that as a result ofthat, the children that she'd
been working with before the warwere likely to be starving to
death. Those that had survived the
conflict itself would be dying now and the disease and
starvation that followed. And so she was handing out
leaflets and chalking up the pavements in the real
suffragette style. She was friends with all the
suffragettes. And she was arrested and taken
(02:48):
away for protesting against the government.
And she conducted her own defence in court and she gave
the court reporters plenty to fill their columns with, but
focusing on the moral case because she knew that
technically she didn't have a leg to stand on.
And she was ultimately fined just 5 lbs which was the
equivalent to victory. And then the Crown prosecutor
came up and he handed her a £5 note.
So the case was over and he was showing the newspaper reporters
(03:11):
that morally he actually agreed with her.
And she said no thanks, I will, I you keep, you know I will pay
my own fine, but I'll take your 5 lbs and put it towards a new
fund to help Save the Children. This was the first ever donation
to Save the Children by the Crown prosecutor in a case
against the founder of Save the Children.
And I used to work at Save the Children and I thought this was
(03:32):
such a fantastic story and I couldn't believe that people
didn't know about this incredible woman.
Not only did she set up the world's leading independent
children's development agency, she also came up with the
concept that children should be party to human rights and wrote
the first statement of children's human rights.
That work is now the most universally accepted human
rights instrument in history. I mean, she's just phenomenal,
but no one has heard of her. So my first book was because I
(03:55):
was working at Save the Children, I'd heard of this
woman, Eklund Tyne Jeb, what a wonderful name.
And amazingly, when it came out,it won the Daily Mail
Biographers Club prize, which was fantastic.
And I thought, my God, I finallyfound something I can do.
I better keep doing it. But I move forward a war to the
Second World War because there had been nobody livehood known
Eglinton, and I really wanted tocapture some of those stories of
(04:16):
the Second Wild War. So that's what brought me into
it. I've already mentioned we met
and we appraised fest and that'spredominantly male space and you
move in, AI want to say a community that is predominantly
male, even though there are plenty of women out there who
know what they're talking about.I was just wondering what that's
(04:36):
like and how you find yourself being received in that sense.
Yeah, well, when I started writing these books, it's
particularly my first Second World War book, which was The
Spy Who Loved. I actually had quite a lot of
aggro from some of the men writing World War 2 histories.
I was quite surprised by that, actually.
Some of it was very unpleasant. But I think in the 15 years or
(04:59):
whatever it is that I've been doing this, things have changed
a lot. So there are a lot of female
writers now working in the same field, Alexandra Churchill, Kate
Vigers, Helen Fry, there's quitea few.
Claire Hubbard Hall is another. There's quite a lot of a Sonia
Pannell, Shrabani Basu. So there is more women working
in this area, but I think there is because of those women and
(05:20):
myself doing, you know, really good, I think high quality work.
It's shown, A, we're here and wecan do it.
And B, there were all these stories that people haven't been
looking at. I mean, I feel very capable of
writing history about the men who served as well.
But there is this rich seam of untold or poorly told, rather
romantically told women's stories.
(05:40):
And actually, you know, when, when we think about women in the
resistance, we're always told how beautiful they were.
We're told how courageous they were, which is true.
We talk a bit about their sacrifice.
And of course, some of them faced terrible treatment and
paid the ultimate price, and we need to honor that.
But we never really told how effective they were, how much
they achieved what they were actually doing.
(06:01):
So I've been trying to restore women to the history books where
they should be for their real achievements in the Second World
War as well. Yes, and, and the women you
write about specifically are women whose stories have not
been told. Yes, at least not not in full
for a long time. And part of that is because
archives were closed or stories were still hidden.
(06:23):
So how do you go about telling those stories that might be a
little bit difficult to uncover?Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I, I really love the research part of what I do and I have no
interest in retelling the stories that have already been
told. Well, I want to tell either
stories that have been missed off from the record or I think
there is a new angle they've been told.
(06:45):
You know, there is a new way to present this story with
information or with a new perspective.
And it's difficult, you know, I mean, Agent Zoe's story was
deliberately kept hidden by the communist regime in post war.
Poland was left with the Soviet backed communist regime.
And the Soviet narrative, even today, the Russian narrative of
the Second World War is quite different from the narrative.
But then I mean, the narrative told in France is different to
(07:07):
the one told in Britain. And in Germany, of course, each
nation presents it in their own way, but the Soviets and the
communists in Poland did not want it told that the women were
playing a key role, that the Home Army, which is that
Poland's resistance armed forceswere very effective.
And so they kept that story out of the records.
So researching this book, I spent a lot of time in Poland
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going around all sorts of archives, getting them to pull
out information deep within. But also I was lucky enough to
interview lots of people who knew so, including a woman who
shared her prison cell, journalists that interviewed her
students she had taught her cousin, even President-elect Val
Wenza came on record God, and I interviewed him in Gdansk, which
was extraordinary. So really fantastic to be able
(07:49):
to pull those primary sources together as well.
So have you visited archives in Poland as well?
A lot of archives in Poland, yeah.
So the National Archives are theEPN, and then there's.
Yeah. I mean, I couldn't list them
all. There's a lot of big archives,
but there's also small archives.And one of the things that Zoe
did was she actually kept records of the women who had
(08:10):
served and she did lots of interviewing herself.
And it was actually considered seditious to do this work after
the war. Bit of a spoiler.
She does survive the war, but lots of drama on the way.
She was arrested again in 1976. She was arrested first in 1951
after the war by the communists and again in 1976 because they
don't want this history recorded.
And she's hiding it in her underwear drawer and her friends
(08:31):
closets. And eventually that has become a
little, not even that small. They've got 10s of thousands of
documents archive in Torun, her home city.
So yes, there are lots of Polisharchives there.
But because she came to Britain,there's a lot of information
about her in the British archives in queue as well.
So yeah, bit of everything really.
Is there anything from those archives, either from the
British one or the punished one,that kind of amazed you and
(08:53):
stopped you in your tracks? Oh, so many things.
Absolutely. Yeah.
I think with Zoe, one of the most extraordinary interviews I
did was with a journalist who'd interviewed her in the 1980s.
I talked to him for a couple of hours and then he said, would
you like to hear her voice? I was like, yeah.
And he had recorded her on tape.And he's, he put a tape into a
(09:13):
tape deck and, and I could hear her banging on the table where
she spoke to him, you know, fullof enthusiasm and choking up
sometimes with emotion and laughing a lot.
She's quite a funny woman. So she's laughing at her own
jokes, which I quite liked. And then at the end, he pushed
these tapes of 27 of them acrossthe table to me.
And he said he hadn't been able to write the interview at the
time because it was communist period.
(09:34):
And she'd asked him not too later because she was quite
modest. But he said her story should be
told. And he just gave them to me.
It was, yeah, that was a bit of a showstopper for me.
Do you still help them those tapes?
No, I don't. They're the actual tapes are
back with him. But the transcripts, I've got
the transcripts and they're alsoin the archive that she set up
in her hometown now. So yeah.
So reading the book, I'm I'm slightly jumping ahead, but just
(09:58):
for a second. I can't even imagine just
spending your entire life dedicated to those women, not,
not just in the world, but then after the world when the world
didn't really end for any of them in Poland, which I think we
tend to forget here and and. Very recently we were
celebrating the 80th anniversaryof VE Day, and I was doing lots
(10:19):
of press for that and interviews.
And there's a sense of, you know, everyone was celebrating
peace and freedom. And of course, the polls
weren't. The polls were celebrating
peace, but they had suffered huge fast losses and they didn't
get freedom at all. And I think it's often forgotten
the story of, I think when we think about resistance, we in
the Second World War, we tend tothink about France.
(10:41):
And there's incredible stories there.
And I've written some of that history myself.
But we're much less good at remembering what was going on in
Eastern Europe and Poland in particular.
And you know, there is a war going on at the moment.
Russia has invaded Ukraine. A lot of the cities that Zoe was
working in, and especially in the start of the war, she was
based in Lavuv, which was in eastern Poland, which is now
Laviv in Ukraine. And if we want to understand
(11:03):
this current conflict, we need to look at the roots.
We need to go back to the history and we we need to be
much better realizing that's part of our shared history, our
shared story. It never really ends, does it?
It makes you sad, but at the same time, books like yours
about these women also give me hope.
So. That's kind.
Thank you. Well, I am inspired by these
incredible women as well. Yeah.
(11:25):
Right. You've got to hope that there's
women out there still today, andthen that would do the same
thing, do the right thing at least.
Well, I think there are, I thinkthere are lots of Ukrainian
people, men and women serving atthe moment who are very much
along those lines. And I really hope that we're not
tested further. But I, you know, we talk about
the greatest Generation and theywere tested and they rose to
(11:46):
that test. You know, should it happen
again, I feel sure that within our society there are those
people who will come forward again.
Not me. I'm a complete coward.
I've got no sense of direction and no language skills.
But there are wonderful people in every generation.
I just hope we're not tested. I agree a little bit more about
your writing style. I can tell you do a lot of
research, a lot of it is directly in your books, but also
(12:09):
you make it engaging and fun. So how do you balance historical
accuracy and storytelling withinyour books if you know how to
answer that question? Yeah, I mean it's a tough one,
isn't it? I think it's really important if
you are writing non fiction and you say it's non fiction,
history has to be accurate. So I don't put things in my
books that are not available in the archives.
(12:31):
You know, any dialogue or any expression from the people in
the book has been captured in a letter or on tape in an
interview or whatever. So they're all direct quotes.
And I think someone told me off on an Amazon book review, they
said I bought this book. I was disappointed because the
last fifth of it is all footnotes.
And I was thinking, well, actually, that's quite good.
I did all that work. You know, that's great.
(12:52):
I was quite proud of that. But I also think it's really
important that this is read. I want people to read these
books. I want people to know the
history. So Zoe's life was complete page
Turner. So I really hope that people
will want to keep turning the pages when they're reading about
it. You know, I'm trying to bring
her vivacity to life, her courage, her determination and
the extraordinary circumstances in which she was serving
(13:14):
throughout the Second World War.I mean, it's really remarkable.
So I don't know. Virginia Woolf called it the
granite and the rainbow. The granite is the facts and the
rainbow is the interpretation and how you knit it together and
present it. So I try to do a bit of both.
But I take, I feel very much that I have a sort of bond of
trust with my readers. People aren't just giving me
1299. They're also giving me however
many hours it takes them to readthis book.
(13:36):
And I feel responsible to the women whose stories I'm telling.
And the readers who are then looking back and hopefully
learning a little from this and hopefully enjoying these books,
that it has to be accurate, but it has to be a good read as
well, I hope. I love paying notes because it's
like a reading list so I feel like the person who made that
comment is like not a real history fan.
(13:57):
Well, you know, I'm open to all so.
Yeah. So let's get into agent So a bit
more Agent So, of course, tells the extraordinary story of
Elsbiera Zavatska, the only woman among Poland's elite,
(14:17):
silent, unseen paratroopers. And this woman was formidable.
I was sending passages to my mother as I was reading it.
I sent her the passage where Zoeis on the train, and she's
realizing that sort of the wallsare closing in and the Nazis
might catch her. And so she just goes and throws
herself out of a moving train. I was just, I like, it was an
(14:40):
absolute page Turner. I feel like my heart was in my
throat. I was so excited to see what was
going to happen next. And at the same time, I was
like, just imagine being in thatsituation and being like, all
right, this is my decision. I'm going to jump out of this
train 1. Of the things I love about her
is when she throws herself off this it's a moving express train
travelling through the night from Krakow to Warsaw, and she
(15:00):
knows that the Gustavo are on her tail and it's not going to
stop. So she just has to take a leap
of faith and hope she doesn't smash her head open on a
Telegraph pole or roll under themetal wheels of the carriages
behind and all that. And she later told a friend that
in moments of mortal danger likethis, her thoughts turned to her
childhood reading, from which she took quite a lot of comfort.
(15:20):
And she really liked cowboy and Indian books.
So she thought these chaps, theythrow themselves up in the air
to try and slow down their momentum.
So she tried to jump up into theair, but it didn't really work.
She just crashed down really hard and really fast.
But she survived. She made it.
So, you know, if that's where she took her courage, all good
to her. And I love that that's what was
in her mind at that moment. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
(15:42):
Yeah. She was fearless and some
people, I think particularly men, found her abrasive at
times. She certainly had a style of
leadership where you know, she was pretty.
She didn't take any shit, I guess is the best way to say it.
I wonder if you could talk to usabout the ways in which her
personality, her leadership style, and the way she
interacted with those around herhelped or maybe hindered her
(16:04):
resistance work. You know, it's, I feel it is a
very gendered question and I am asked it quite often framed in
various ways. And I mean, I'm really glad to
use the word leadership because if you have quite an abrasive
male leader of an armed force ora unit, it tends to sort of
generate respect and some, or, and I feel inspired that I must
(16:25):
reach that level. And when Zoe is quite abrupt and
determined and very clear in hergoals and what needs to be done,
it tends to be referred to as abrasive and difficult.
And I, I think this is very mucha gendered thing.
So yeah, she took no prisoners. I mean, not in a literal sense.
She was a no holds barred kind of person, extremely determined.
(16:46):
And ultimately she delivered, you know, she got what she
wanted. So there's a bit when she, one
of her missions she sent as the personal emissary of the
commander in chief of the PolishHome Army, which is this massive
resistance force. And she's sent to represent him
to undertake 2 missions in London and to bring 2 very
important microfilm over. So she has to cross nearly 1000
miles of enemy occupied territory to get to Britain.
(17:07):
Eventually she makes it, having been shot at in mountains and
nearly drowned on a train and bombed and all sorts of things.
She makes it and she undertakes her first mission and it's to
sort out a unit of young men whoare not delivering sufficiently
quickly when they're organizing the British end of the land
(17:28):
Courier route. And so she is abrasive with
them. She's pretty tough and one of
these guys thinks he'll kind of knock the corners off her by
flirting with her. He says his ambition was peaked.
His name is Rum, that's his codename which I love.
He's a fantastic character, I'vegot to say.
There was a lot of information in his sons attic which his son
kindly got out and shared with me.
It was just brilliant. Rum married a woman who had
(17:50):
previously been Zoe's driver in Britain.
I was just like, oh, this is fantastic.
Anyhow, Rum decides to flirt with her before he's married and
he flourishes some silk stockings at her in a sunny park
one May morning. And he said, you know, her
response was startling. You know, she's just not
interested at all. But actually it's quite helpful
because she realises what the problem is.
Had she have worn these silk stockings in Warsaw, she'd have
(18:11):
been collected by the Nazis immediately, because the only
women wearing such expensive lingerie are the wives or the
mistresses of Gestapo officers. They're not available.
There isn't enough food available in occupied Poland.
They're not wearing silk stockings.
And she realises this guy, he's a brilliant soldier.
He's served with real heroism intwo campaigns already, but he's
(18:34):
never experienced occupation. And he kind of thinks it's the
same as London. And so, you know, they clock off
on a Friday at 5:00 and don't start work again till 9:00 on
Monday. And it leaves these couriers in
limbo for 48 hours with without any orders or receipt of their
stuff, their information, they've moved on and so on.
So she sorts him out completely.And he's fairly terrified of
(18:55):
her, really, and very grumbly about it.
But ultimately she sorts the system out, they start working
together and they end up becoming really good friends.
And they served alongside each other in the Warsaw Uprising in
August to watch over 1944 and became very good friends.
So yes, it was difficult, I think, for some of her
colleagues to adjust to her style.
But when they started seeing heras a soldier rather than a
(19:18):
woman, it all works very well. We love that part with the
stockings. I can see Mark smiling because
we talked about it previously. Yeah, I love it.
Yeah. So the other thing about Zoe is
that, I mean, as you already mentioned, she does survive the
war and she undergoes quite a lot more hardship under the
communist regime when the history of the resistance in
World War 2 was suppressed. And she's really not taking no
(19:41):
for an answer on that. And she's still trying to kind
of preserve this history and thememories of the people that she
cared about and all that kind ofstuff.
And she lived quite a long time.So we almost kind of get this
backdrop of a century of Polish history, which for me was
fascinating because they didn't know a lot about it.
I wonder, do you have a connection to Poland?
No, I don't. Well, I mean, minorly.
I when I finished university, I taught English as a foreign
(20:04):
language in Poland for a while as a volunteer with UNESCO.
In fact, I'd studied Polish politics as part of my first
degree. Then I went out there and became
fascinated. You know, it's that, it's that
thing that Warsaw is basically halfway between Moscow and
Berlin, and that's not a great place to be.
But it means that they have thisincredibly rich history as a
positive way of putting it. I mean, they have centuries of
(20:25):
being invaded and annexed and occupied by their very
aggressive, acquisitive neighbors, but also centuries of
defiance and resistance and liberation by themselves.
It's a heroic, determined, fascinating history.
And so I've been out there. The country is stunning.
It's an amazing place. So yeah, I've been fascinated by
it. But it was just a chance that
(20:46):
after my first book had done quite well, I got an agent,
which was fantastic. And he said, what are you going
to write next? I hadn't thought about it at
all. First book was a complete labor
of love. And so he said, what you're
interested in. So I said, well, this woman's
story wasn't told very well. And I'm a feminist and I felt
that the women's stories, history should be told in a more
professional way. And it's like, great.
Well, that's, you know, that's you've narrowed it by half.
(21:07):
What else? So I know I was quite interested
in Poland and it was actually him that came up with Christina
Scarbeck, also known as Christine Granville, born
Polish, died a British citizen, and she was the first woman to
serve Britain directly as a special agent in the Second
World War and also the longest serving agent, male or female,
for Britain in the war and one of the most high achieving.
She was absolutely incredible. So I knew I had to write her
(21:29):
story, but then I went off. I wrote about these two German
women that you mentioned in yourintro.
There were only two women who served as test pilots in the
Third Reich, and one was a fanatical Nazi, Hannah Wright,
but the other one was secretly part Jewish, secretly in the
resistance. Hannah Reich once tried to save
Hitler's life, and Melitta actually tried to kill Hitler.
(21:49):
So you got sort of 360° on what was going on inside Nazi Germany
there. And I thought that was an
amazing story that should be better known.
And then Zoe, I met a veteran ofthe Second World War, a
wonderful woman. I was at an event at the Polish
Embassy and lots of very important guests there.
It was all very interesting. And there was this little old
women sitting at the back. So I made a beeline for her and
(22:12):
started shouting to her. I said, may I ask what brings
you here? And she said that she was a
veteran of the Second World War.So she's often invited to these
embassy events. And she said the wine was very
good. So she liked to come.
And I, I immediately liked her and Hannah Chonotsuka.
And I said, if you're a veteran,can do you mind if I ask your
story? So I went to interview her
later. I didn't publish an interview
with her, I think, for History Today magazine some years ago.
(22:33):
And she had been a teenager, 16 year old in the Warsaw Uprising.
And she hadn't fought with a gunin hand.
But she had volunteered to go out across the city under siege
to try and get medical supplies for the field hospitals, which
tended to be in Cellars and basements.
And one day she ran out and, youknow, she's looking for
pharmacies, even people's housesthat have been ruined, anything
(22:54):
to try and get any medical supplies.
And one day she reached the university and she found 10
glass bottles of methylated spirits which could be used as
antiseptics. So she put them in her rucksack
and started running back and shewas caught in a German
incendiary bombing raid so far bombing raid.
And she saw these buildings start to shake and collapse
around her and then she felt something smashed into her back,
(23:16):
but she was protected by these glass bottles.
Only one of them broke and then she was running on.
She said she had this strange sensation of suddenly feeling
freezing in a burning St. because this methylated spirits
had soaked through her bag, soaked through her shirt, and it
was evaporating off her back. And she turned to me then and
looked me straight in the eye. And she said I knew that I was
going to die then because I was a petrol bomb.
(23:39):
And she just kept running. And eventually she made it back
to the field hospital. And she handed over the bottles.
And all they said was, we've broken one of these.
And that was what conditions were like in the Warsaw
Uprising. And she said, what are you doing
here? And I just felt really tiny.
You know, I'm not a veteran of anything.
And I'd written a book on Christina Scarbett, Christine
Granville. It's called The Spy Who Loved
(24:00):
Her. I was, I was there for that.
And she said, Oh yes, Christina,she was an amazing character.
But for goodness sake, why didn't you write about the real
heroine? Why didn't you write about Zoe?
And I had to say, well, who's Zoe?
So that was how I came across Zoe's story.
That's, that was the start of it.
So it's just chance, really. I've done two books written
about two women from Poland, butI've written about two women
from Germany and a woman from Britain as well.
(24:21):
So I think there are remarkable stories there though, that we
should know better. Yeah.
And that that kind of me into mylast question.
You have so many, I find anyway,really richly fleshed out
background characters. You mentioned Rum we discussed
offline as well. Amelia, one of those friends
who's kind of a tragic figure. I wonder, how do you decide
whose story to tell? Like if you know, how do you
(24:42):
decide who to spotlight? He's a really good question, so
I'm not normally asked that. So in on those tapes that we
mentioned with Andrew Djzynski, who had was the journalist who'd
interviewed her, she had said partly why he hadn't written is
that she had said I don't want abook just about me.
It was a team method. If any book's got to be written,
it's got to reflect the team. And I really felt that I in
honouring her character, her story, that she's right, I
(25:04):
needed to honour more than just one person.
So it's really about these five intertwined stories of women and
two two men. Rum is one of them and Yan
Rumvak, just Juransky is the other.
And they all knew each other at different stages.
They're all really good mates, so they're closely connected.
So I felt that the story meshed quite tightly.
It all held together. They weren't really random
people doing different things. So Amelia, who you mentioned is
(25:26):
Zoe's best mate, is her boss, but they end up becoming best
mates and they're chalk and cheese.
So she was a wonderful foil for Zoe as a character for me to put
in the book as well. Amelia's terribly romantic and
actually gets married during thewar, although whether she'd
divorce her first husband at that point, I don't know really.
It's not in the records because a lot of the records were
destroyed. And there's this wonderful scene
of her wedding and her honeymoonup in the mountains with the
(25:48):
partisan leaders and the freezing night.
Apparently her new husband threwan elk skin on the ground.
He was the partisan leader. So a little bit away from the
campus and privacy. And they obviously had a
ravishing, wonderful night underthe stars.
And in the middle of the night, she woke up and she looked, she
could see this belt of stars above her, and she tried to move
her head to look at the stars, and she couldn't move her head
(26:09):
because it was so cold. Her hair had frozen to the
forest floor. And she couldn't.
It's just this lovely story. And so she is a character.
She's a very different character.
This is very hard woman Zoe, very funny, but strong Zoe.
And what makes her sort of lovely and sweet is also what
ruins her in the end. It's fascinating.
So I wanted stories like those. And I mean, she works very
(26:31):
closely with though throughout the war, so it's not an add on.
I really felt it was important to mesh them.
And all of those stories are like that.
So, and they all come together in the Warsaw Uprising, and then
some of them make it through thewar and some don't, of course.
And I'll just interject real quick.
You do it so well too. Everybody gets a real arc and
you get to even the small characters.
(26:52):
You know what happens to them and you know where they end up.
And I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed the book a lot.
Very glad you're going to have to tell me, Mark, sometime about
some of the Dutch female resistors, of whom I know there
were many. But which of them needs a good
story you can tell me? That's a really good question.
I'll have a think about it actually.
You can come back to me on that one.
I'll. Probably see you at the reverse.
(27:15):
For them, I'll be there. To move on to another one of
your books, your First World WarTwo books this by her loved it's
the story of Christine Granvilleburned Christina Skarbeck, the
first one to work as special agent for Britain in World War
(27:39):
2. She's a very different character
from Zoe where Zoe is really straightforward and really kind
of tough and people find her kind of scary sometimes
Christine is I want to say really loved by many people and
especially also by men. So I was wondering specifically
if that has any influence on theresearch that is available about
(28:02):
her? In a sense it does.
I mean, there are lots of account.
Christina Scalbert made a big impression wherever she went.
Although someone did say she could turn her lamp on and turn
it off so she could disappear ina crowd if she needed to, which
was obviously a great skill for her to have in the war.
But she was a pre war beauty queen in Poland.
She was a runner up in the firstever Miss Poland competition.
(28:23):
She's a very vivacious and attractive personality.
And the book is called The Spy Who Loved because she loved
adventure and adrenaline. And perhaps it's ironic that it
was war that enabled a woman to really have a fully used life in
that way. She loved men.
She had two husbands. She had many lovers, many of
whom feature in the book, and they all had stories to tell
(28:45):
about her. So some of them when she
rejected them, tried to kill themselves.
Some of them were just madly in love with her all their lives
and whether or not they were married.
And so there's so it did give memore information, you know, from
these witnesses of her. But most of all, she loved
freedom for her country, the country of her birth, Poland,
for her adopted country, Britain, England, but also for
(29:06):
herself personally. And she didn't want to be tied
down to anyone particular bloke either.
She's very much ahead of her time.
She wanted independence in everyway.
And this makes a really fascinating character to follow
as well. And I, I think, very admirable.
I agree, I obviously I've yet toget to the end but I do feel
like good for her to use. She did love, like genuinely
(29:30):
loved all of them, but also she knew how to use that too.
I don't know if she loved all ofthem.
I mean she loved shagging all ofthem, but I don't know if she
allowed. Sorry.
I don't know if she actually loved them all.
She certainly wanted to have a good fun time, but I think lots
of fellas did. And you know, if you think
you've got six weeks to live, which was the average life
expectancy of a wireless transmitter behind enemy lines,
(29:52):
then you're going to use your time to the full, aren't you?
And if it was a fella, we wouldn't probably be having this
conversation. Now, she did use it.
There are times when, I mean, I think any agent serving behind
enemy lines would use every single skill or attribute they
had to advance their 'cause whenthey needed to.
So there are times when she did a bit of flirting to get her
(30:12):
way, and that's absolutely fair enough.
But of course it can also be very problematic if you are
pretty because it means your face is more memorable and
that's the last thing that you want if you're serving behind
enemy lines. So she would do a lot of
disappearing into the crowd as well.
And this was, you know, her being a bit flirty was just one
of her many skills. I mean, she was fully trained.
(30:33):
She was a member of SOE. She was trained alongside the
SOE across Britain in the Scottish Highlands and all over
the shop. And the course that she excelled
in apparently was silent killing, which is killing just
with a rope, a knife or your bare hands.
There's no evidence she actuallykilled anyone in the war, but
she did make very good use of hand grenades.
Favorite weapon was her commandoknife.
She was very highly trained, so she hadn't she brought a whole
(30:55):
lot of skills, but I think her best weapon was actually her
brain. And what you find is that she's
always talking her way into situations and talking her way
out of trouble. She's so quick thinking there's
a time where both she and her one of her lovers, Andre, have
been arrested and they're both being interrogated in Budapest.
And what she does was amazing. She was already feeling unwell
(31:17):
and her sweetheart was thinking how long is she going to last
because she's actually got the start of pneumonia.
But she decided to make a virtueof her apparent weakness, her
ill health. So she had a hacking cough
already. So she kept coughing and she bit
her tongue and and not a little but hard and repeatedly until
her mouth filled with blood and then when it coughed it looked
as if she was coughing up blood from her lungs, which is a
(31:39):
symptom of tuberculosis TB. And at this point there was no
cure for TB. The Germans were rightly
terrified of this disease. You know TB's carried by
waterborne droplets. So basically interrogation and
TB do not mix well. So they threw her out and
rightly suspecting that the man was her lover, they thought he
must have already got the disease but not yet showing the
symptoms. So they threw him out as well.
It was so brilliant. And later on, SOE was started
(32:02):
putting together handy tips and hints to give their trainees as
well. And in that there's a little
book that they made. And at one point it says in this
situation you could try biting your tongue to see if you can
represent having TB. She had fed that back, and
they're using that in her training.
So, you know, I don't think it'swrong to focus too much on her
(32:23):
being able to flirt at times, which she did at times.
Her real skill was her guts, hercourage and her quick thinking.
You know, she's incredibly fast.And that combined with her blunt
courage means she achieves so much, you know, including the
defection of an entire Nazi German Garrison in the Alps.
And on another time, saving the lives of three men who are about
(32:44):
to be executed in a football pitch, she manages to secure
their release. And another time she manages to
gets the first microfilm evidence of preparations for
Operation Barbarossa across Europe.
And they reached Churchill's desk, at which point he says,
you know, whoever this is, they're my favorite spy.
She is remarkable. So flirting is just a small part
of it. Yes, thanks for clearing that
(33:05):
up. Because I, that's where I was
going to go with this actually, because obviously when you title
you broke the Spy Who loved, people are going to think just
from the title, oh, this is a woman who loved men.
Yeah, it's a. It's a dot dot dot on the title.
I don't say anything. You know, it's, it's the spy who
loved and it is men and it is danger and it is adventure, but
(33:25):
it's also freedom. And I put that in at the end of
the book. Yeah.
Let's talk about the women who flew for Hitler.
Wow. So it's a dual biography of two
elite female pilots, Hannah Riceand Malita von Stauffenberg.
Both of them flew dangerous testmissions for the Nazi regime. 1
(33:49):
was a fanatically devoted Nazi, a woman who tried to organize a
kamikaze unit and was with Hitler in his bunker during his
final days. And the other was a brilliant
aeronautical engineer, a part Jewish woman who kept her head
down but tried to use her ties to the Nazi regime to protect
her family. So when I came into this book,
my initial special thought was Iwonder how she's going to weave
(34:10):
those stories together. And I wonder what made you
decide to tell both of those stories side by side.
Well. I good I knew the Hannah Wright
story. She is by far the better known
person and there had been a newish biography after I'd
signed my contract. Actually a new biography came
out of Hannah Wright and it saidbasically we've probably
(34:31):
misjudged her. It was very difficult being a
woman in 3rd right? She probably didn't know what
was going on and she's a real heroine.
She was incredibly brave and, you know, we should treat her as
such. And I just thought, no,
actually, she did know what was going on just because she was
female and she wasn't a member of the Nazi Party.
But lots of people weren't all sorts of reasons for that,
including very committed Nazis. And I found evidence that she
(34:51):
did know what was going on in Maginek concentration and
extermination camp. So, you know, I think just
because you're female doesn't get you off the hook.
You know, if we are feminists, we tell the truth.
We tell the whole story. So I thought that her story had
been quite, there's quite a lot of literature about her.
She comes not quite a lot, but Ithought perhaps I needed to sort
of pin down the fact that she isactually a complete Nazi.
(35:13):
Yes, she is incredibly brave andshe's a brilliant pilot, very
skilled, particularly with gliders, an extraordinary woman
in many ways, and also a racist and an anti Semite and a Nazi.
But I only decided to do the book when I came across this
other story of this other woman.Ironically, I came across
Melissa's story because Hannah had tried to hide it after the
war. Some years after the war,
(35:34):
Melissa had died 1st and and hersister Clara was thinking, why
does everyone just talk about Hannah Wright as the only Nazi
female test pilot? And when my sister was doing the
same work and more, because she was also an engineer, she was
designing and testing the aircraft.
So she decided to write Melissa's biography and she put
a note, an advert in the German newspaper saying if anyone's got
(35:55):
memories of working alongside her or knew her socially, please
get in touch. And Hannah Wright saw these
adverts and got in touch and sent the most vitriolic, deeply
unpleasant, threatening letters to militia sister saying that
she was, you know, she was ashamed.
She only had ambition because ofher racial burden and a hideous
terminology like this. It was absolutely grim.
(36:17):
And she said, I know a lot of bad stuff.
You won't want to come out and see the open.
So I'm not going to, you know, if you want me to contribute,
I'm going to tell all this bad stuff.
But you might want to just give up the idea now.
And Clara, unfortunately, was browbeaten and didn't tell her
sister's story. So that book wasn't written.
And I was like, oh, my gosh, here we have a woman, a part
Jewish woman, a brilliant pilot,brilliant aeronautical engineer.
(36:37):
But in the end, she does much more than trying to defend her
family. She's involved in one of the
most famous plots to kill Hitler.
But her story was completely left out as one of the big set
pieces of the war that we talk about.
And her name's never mentioned. And I came across her only
because Hannah had written theseletters that ended up in an
archive. I was like, oh, my goodness, who
is this other woman? And I managed to trace her
family. And she didn't have children,
(36:59):
but her nephew and his wife and their family went out to meet
them in Germany. And they showed me among the
stuff they had. They had a file basically it had
a little mark on it in German and they said it, they said what
this means is basically marked as domestic, you know, sent to
the, sent back to the family. All the men's papers involved in
this bomb plot were sent to Freiburg.
You know, they're all quite wellnamed, well known men.
(37:21):
But her papers, she was a woman,it was assumed when they were
doing the archiving, but she couldn't have any relevance
because she was female. And they just sent it back to
the family. And that's how women get written
out of history, not even at the book stage, but in the archive
stage. You know, if the papers aren't
there and we't trolling the archives, how are we ever going
to find these women? And I was just very lucky to
come across her name and her story.
So I knew then they were absolutely fantastic foils for
(37:42):
each other. You would think they were so
similar, pioneering female pilots, you know, bloody blah.
But actually they were diametrically opposed in almost
every way and they loathed each other, so apparently wouldn't
have a cup of tea together. But some flaming arguments
between them, some of which are recorded, which is marvellous.
So yeah, it just gave this fantastic opportunity for a book
(38:04):
to look at different size, different perspectives, and I
hope that makes it interesting. There is some absolute justice
in Hannah's attempts to bury Melita, being one of the reasons
why her story came to light ultimately.
Isn't that just fabulous? Yeah, it's great.
And I also think Hannah's story is topical in some ways.
You know, directly confronted bysomeone who had seen the
(38:26):
concentration camps, her response basically was fake
news. You know, even after the war,
doubling down on that. Yeah, that's what they call
denial. You know, she was smart.
She was intelligent. She'd seen the evidence.
But you know, she had huge courage physically.
She was testing these perilous new developed designs, but she
had absolutely 0 moral courage and never could let herself
(38:48):
question what I think at the back of the mind she probably
knew to be true. Yeah, absolutely.
I got that sense too. And Melita, on the other hand,
she, of course, was carrying theweight of this, well, almost
newly discovered Jewish ancestry, right?
They didn't sort of have that sense before the war, and then
they found out. Yeah, her.
Her father had been born Jewish,but he had converted as a
teenager, and he'd never discussed it with his children.
(39:10):
You know, he was a Protestant and he'd married a Protestant
family, and that was his identity.
You know, it was only after the Nazis come in that people start.
A lot of people started definingthemselves as Jewish because
they'd been defined as such, notbecause that's how they had seen
themselves previously. Yeah, so she's, you know, she's
carrying the weight of the secret identity.
And of course she and some of her family members were involved
(39:32):
in this high profile plot to assassinate Hitler.
But then she also spent most of the war working directly for the
Luftwaffe, working on, you know,technology to help a plane
buried better at night and that kind of stuff.
How did you find making sense ofher as a person?
Well, I mean, I think it's all there in the book.
I just think that people are complex.
You know, when I wrote that book, 1 reviewer said he was
(39:52):
embarrassed to read it on the train because it's called The
Women Who Flee for Hitler. It's like, well, you know, we
read biographies of Hitler and Stalin and we don't assume that
we therefore support them. This is about two.
I don't know if that's a gendered thing as well.
It's about two women who serve the. 3rd Reich.
But one of them ultimately resisted.
And I think that's really fascinating.
Somebody said to me, oh, great, you've written about good Nazis.
(40:12):
I was like, no, there are no good Nazis.
And somebody said, oh, wonderful.
I love the way you write about difficult women.
I get a bit fed up with this because I feel so cartoonish to
characterize in one, one word, difficult woman or, you know,
these are real women. And what I've tried to do is
present the complexity of their characters, the complexity of
the times in which they served, you know, under a dictatorship
(40:34):
in a time of war, with limited news outlets available to them
and so on. All of that.
And yet also they made moral choices.
And the fact they made very different choices underlines
that there was, you know, limited choice available, but
there was some. So I think I think that's
fascinating. I love the grey areas in
history. Yeah, I quite liked it too.
I, we always talk on the podcastabout how we like perspectives
(40:58):
of history that people haven't maybe necessarily thought a lot
about. And so reading that book, I
really, I got a lot out of it. So historically.
Like you said, in preparation for this, we could talk for
hours if we were to answer all these questions, but I really
appreciate you trying to give usa little bit of an overview of
some of the incredible women that are out there and whose
(41:22):
stories are waiting to be told. We also talk a lot.
What about obviously a movies and TV show?
So if any of your books were to be adapted to the big screen,
which one of those books would you wanted to be?
Well, I can't. That's like choosing between
your children. All of them.
They have all been under option at different times apart from
(41:42):
Zo. Zo's a new one.
And I'm actually talking to a production company at the moment
about Zo, so that's quite exciting.
And yeah, that would leave just one of them out of option at the
moment, but there's a sniff of interest there.
I mean, having said that, none of them have ever been made.
So it's very nice to receive a bit of option money, but it'd be
much better to actually have them on the big screen.
And I think it's high time, you know, everyone's talking about
(42:03):
James Bond. Who's going to be the new Bond?
Could there be a black man? Could there be a woman?
And everyone seems outrage and Idon't really get it.
It's a fictional character, right?
Though I don't think we need to claim a female Bond.
In any case. I think we have these women,
these real women who actually were much better than Bonds.
They weren't figments of someone's imagination.
They were out there doing the real job, really risking their
(42:24):
lives. And then we have series on TV
like SAS, Rogue Heroes, and which are sort of questionable
in some of the history anyhow, but basically convey something
that is fascinating and brings this to a new audience.
So I'm all in support. But there's one woman in there
who seem, it seems to be wearinga green satin being a sex
object. I think she killed someone once.
But you know, this is not what most of these women were doing.
(42:47):
They were out there playing hugely significant roles in
sabotage, in running escape lines, in hiding people, in
being couriers, in gathering military intelligence, in
delivering that intelligence, in.
So fighting with gun in hand. You know, why aren't those
stories being told? And I think there is a real
hunger for them. You know, I think there's an
appetite and I get lots of extraordinary emails.
(43:08):
One of the things I'm really proud of is that both men and
women read my books and they both get back to me and say,
wow, this is amazing history. So come on TV, people film
people, get in touch. Yeah, I can't wait to see a
movie right now. If it's made, it'll definitely
be on our podcast. Oh, thank you.
I'd love to come back if you'll have me.
Of course. I would love to get a book rack
(43:29):
if you have any World War Two books or maybe perhaps female
authors or historians that you would recommend.
Oh. So many.
I think Anne Seba is a brilliantauthor.
Just about, well, all the books of hers that I've read, which
are mainly the Second World War ones are brilliant.
She wrote an excellent book called Le Parisienne about the
women in Paris before and duringthe war and a bit after.
(43:49):
And her new book is on the women's orchestra of Auschwitz,
which I reviewed. And I think it is really
powerfully told, a really important and emotional story.
And she doesn't hesitate to ask the difficult questions, which I
think is so important. Caroline Moorhead is very good,
especially on Italy. If you're interested in the
Italian female partisans, there's been a couple of good
(44:10):
books on the French Resistance and the women out there as well.
So, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of good female writers doing
good stuff, yeah. Amazing.
Thank you so much. This has been a great chat.
Do you have anything else Martha, if you wanted to ask?
Maybe just run that slightly offthe beacon path just for fun.
If you could sit down with any of the women you wrote about and
(44:31):
have a cup of tea with them, whowould it be?
I don't really want to have a cup of tea with any of them
because I'm not sure that the subjects of my book want to meet
their biographer. If I did have a cup of tea, it
would have to be before the bookwas published so that I could
get all the dirt and make sure Igot it right.
But I would really love to be a family on the wall and to watch
(44:52):
them all without being seen. You know, I would love to follow
that round just to, you know, how accurate.
Did I really capture them in character?
Did I get all of the history correct?
I would love to witness them in action.
That's what I I would like. That's pretty good.
Do you want to promote anything at the very end of this podcast?
Is there anything that you want to plug other than all your
(45:14):
books? No, other than all my books, no.
I love all my books to be plugged as much as possible.
I've got a website, clairemolly.com, if people want
to find out where I'm giving talks or what else.
I'm writing articles and reviewsand things, that's all on there.
And, but basically, yeah, I justlove it.
If people read the book and if they could be kind enough to
leave a nice review anywhere, that's always really helpful as
well. Yes, everyone go and support
(45:34):
Claire so that we get way more books about women in World War
2, so I have lots to read. Thank you very much, I've really
enjoyed our chat today. Thank you so much for coming on.
No, it's a real pleasure. Thank you both.
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Rosie Doe
(45:57):
Reviewer. You can find us wherever you get
your podcast and rate US five stars.
You can send this episode to your friend and also recommend
Claire's books so we get more ofthem and we get movies and
shows. You can find us on Instagram at
Rosie Doe Reviewer Podcast or you can visit our website,
rosiedoereviewer.com. See you next week.
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm Marija.
And we like World War 2 media and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer.
Today we're joined by Claire Mulley, an award-winning
historian and biographer known for bringing to light the untold
(00:23):
stories of remarkable women in World War 2.
Her works include The Spy who Loved detailing the life of
Christina Skarbek or Christine Granville, Britain's first
female special agent, The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a dual
biography of German test pilots Hannah Reich and Melita von
Stauffenberg, and Agent Zoe, which follows the extraordinary
journey of Elschevira Zavatska, the only female member of
(00:44):
Poland's silent, unseen paratroopers.
Through meticulous research and compelling storytelling, Claire
sheds light on the complexities and courage of women in wartime.
Welcome, Claire, and thank you for being on our podcast.
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks very much for inviting me
on. First of all, Claire, I just
want to say congratulations on your recent award that you won.
(01:04):
Thank you. I got silver for Military
History magazine, Book of the Year 2025, which I'm absolutely
thrilled about, and also really excited because I'm shortlisted
for the women's prize for nonfiction this year, both for
Agent Zoe. So yes, fingers crossed for
that. But to be honest, it just feels
absolutely fantastic to be on the podium with either of those
(01:24):
wonderful prizes, so that's great.
That's really fun. Claire and I met very briefly
last year at We are Both Fest and and we didn't talk for very
long, but I did listen to your talk about Zoe since I have been
obsessed with her. She's awesome.
She is. I was wondering, and I'm sure
(01:44):
all my listeners are, because there aren't that many
biographies about women in WorldWar 2.
What brought you to them? How did you start telling their
stories? My first book was Slightly
Different, the book that broughtme into this.
It was a biography of a woman whose life was affected very
much by the First World War and she was a humanitarian.
(02:05):
She was absolutely fantastic, soinspiring.
After the First World War she was campaigning in Trafalgar
Square, traditional site of public protest for the then
Liberal government to end the economic blockade to Europe.
This was after the Armistice hadbeen signed but before peace was
formally declared. So they're doing the
negotiations at Versailles for the Treaty of Versailles.
And they had continued the economic blockade to Europe as a
(02:27):
way of pushing through harsher peace terms really.
And she knew that as a result ofthat, the children that she'd
been working with before the warwere likely to be starving to
death. Those that had survived the
conflict itself would be dying now and the disease and
starvation that followed. And so she was handing out
leaflets and chalking up the pavements in the real
suffragette style. She was friends with all the
suffragettes. And she was arrested and taken
(02:48):
away for protesting against the government.
And she conducted her own defence in court and she gave
the court reporters plenty to fill their columns with, but
focusing on the moral case because she knew that
technically she didn't have a leg to stand on.
And she was ultimately fined just 5 lbs which was the
equivalent to victory. And then the Crown prosecutor
came up and he handed her a £5 note.
So the case was over and he was showing the newspaper reporters
(03:11):
that morally he actually agreed with her.
And she said no thanks, I will, I you keep, you know I will pay
my own fine, but I'll take your 5 lbs and put it towards a new
fund to help Save the Children. This was the first ever donation
to Save the Children by the Crown prosecutor in a case
against the founder of Save the Children.
And I used to work at Save the Children and I thought this was
(03:32):
such a fantastic story and I couldn't believe that people
didn't know about this incredible woman.
Not only did she set up the world's leading independent
children's development agency, she also came up with the
concept that children should be party to human rights and wrote
the first statement of children's human rights.
That work is now the most universally accepted human
rights instrument in history. I mean, she's just phenomenal,
but no one has heard of her. So my first book was because I
(03:55):
was working at Save the Children, I'd heard of this
woman, Eklund Tyne Jeb, what a wonderful name.
And amazingly, when it came out,it won the Daily Mail
Biographers Club prize, which was fantastic.
And I thought, my God, I finallyfound something I can do.
I better keep doing it. But I move forward a war to the
Second World War because there had been nobody livehood known
Eglinton, and I really wanted tocapture some of those stories of
(04:16):
the Second Wild War. So that's what brought me into
it. I've already mentioned we met
and we appraised fest and that'spredominantly male space and you
move in, AI want to say a community that is predominantly
male, even though there are plenty of women out there who
know what they're talking about.I was just wondering what that's
(04:36):
like and how you find yourself being received in that sense.
Yeah, well, when I started writing these books, it's
particularly my first Second World War book, which was The
Spy Who Loved. I actually had quite a lot of
aggro from some of the men writing World War 2 histories.
I was quite surprised by that, actually.
Some of it was very unpleasant. But I think in the 15 years or
(04:59):
whatever it is that I've been doing this, things have changed
a lot. So there are a lot of female
writers now working in the same field, Alexandra Churchill, Kate
Vigers, Helen Fry, there's quitea few.
Claire Hubbard Hall is another. There's quite a lot of a Sonia
Pannell, Shrabani Basu. So there is more women working
in this area, but I think there is because of those women and
(05:20):
myself doing, you know, really good, I think high quality work.
It's shown, A, we're here and wecan do it.
And B, there were all these stories that people haven't been
looking at. I mean, I feel very capable of
writing history about the men who served as well.
But there is this rich seam of untold or poorly told, rather
romantically told women's stories.
(05:40):
And actually, you know, when, when we think about women in the
resistance, we're always told how beautiful they were.
We're told how courageous they were, which is true.
We talk a bit about their sacrifice.
And of course, some of them faced terrible treatment and
paid the ultimate price, and we need to honor that.
But we never really told how effective they were, how much
they achieved what they were actually doing.
(06:01):
So I've been trying to restore women to the history books where
they should be for their real achievements in the Second World
War as well. Yes, and, and the women you
write about specifically are women whose stories have not
been told. Yes, at least not not in full
for a long time. And part of that is because
archives were closed or stories were still hidden.
(06:23):
So how do you go about telling those stories that might be a
little bit difficult to uncover?Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I, I really love the research part of what I do and I have no
interest in retelling the stories that have already been
told. Well, I want to tell either
stories that have been missed off from the record or I think
there is a new angle they've been told.
(06:45):
You know, there is a new way to present this story with
information or with a new perspective.
And it's difficult, you know, I mean, Agent Zoe's story was
deliberately kept hidden by the communist regime in post war.
Poland was left with the Soviet backed communist regime.
And the Soviet narrative, even today, the Russian narrative of
the Second World War is quite different from the narrative.
But then I mean, the narrative told in France is different to
(07:07):
the one told in Britain. And in Germany, of course, each
nation presents it in their own way, but the Soviets and the
communists in Poland did not want it told that the women were
playing a key role, that the Home Army, which is that
Poland's resistance armed forceswere very effective.
And so they kept that story out of the records.
So researching this book, I spent a lot of time in Poland
(07:29):
going around all sorts of archives, getting them to pull
out information deep within. But also I was lucky enough to
interview lots of people who knew so, including a woman who
shared her prison cell, journalists that interviewed her
students she had taught her cousin, even President-elect Val
Wenza came on record God, and I interviewed him in Gdansk, which
was extraordinary. So really fantastic to be able
(07:49):
to pull those primary sources together as well.
So have you visited archives in Poland as well?
A lot of archives in Poland, yeah.
So the National Archives are theEPN, and then there's.
Yeah. I mean, I couldn't list them
all. There's a lot of big archives,
but there's also small archives.And one of the things that Zoe
did was she actually kept records of the women who had
(08:10):
served and she did lots of interviewing herself.
And it was actually considered seditious to do this work after
the war. Bit of a spoiler.
She does survive the war, but lots of drama on the way.
She was arrested again in 1976. She was arrested first in 1951
after the war by the communists and again in 1976 because they
don't want this history recorded.
And she's hiding it in her underwear drawer and her friends
(08:31):
closets. And eventually that has become a
little, not even that small. They've got 10s of thousands of
documents archive in Torun, her home city.
So yes, there are lots of Polisharchives there.
But because she came to Britain,there's a lot of information
about her in the British archives in queue as well.
So yeah, bit of everything really.
Is there anything from those archives, either from the
British one or the punished one,that kind of amazed you and
(08:53):
stopped you in your tracks? Oh, so many things.
Absolutely. Yeah.
I think with Zoe, one of the most extraordinary interviews I
did was with a journalist who'd interviewed her in the 1980s.
I talked to him for a couple of hours and then he said, would
you like to hear her voice? I was like, yeah.
And he had recorded her on tape.And he's, he put a tape into a
(09:13):
tape deck and, and I could hear her banging on the table where
she spoke to him, you know, fullof enthusiasm and choking up
sometimes with emotion and laughing a lot.
She's quite a funny woman. So she's laughing at her own
jokes, which I quite liked. And then at the end, he pushed
these tapes of 27 of them acrossthe table to me.
And he said he hadn't been able to write the interview at the
time because it was communist period.
(09:34):
And she'd asked him not too later because she was quite
modest. But he said her story should be
told. And he just gave them to me.
It was, yeah, that was a bit of a showstopper for me.
Do you still help them those tapes?
No, I don't. They're the actual tapes are
back with him. But the transcripts, I've got
the transcripts and they're alsoin the archive that she set up
in her hometown now. So yeah.
So reading the book, I'm I'm slightly jumping ahead, but just
(09:58):
for a second. I can't even imagine just
spending your entire life dedicated to those women, not,
not just in the world, but then after the world when the world
didn't really end for any of them in Poland, which I think we
tend to forget here and and. Very recently we were
celebrating the 80th anniversaryof VE Day, and I was doing lots
(10:19):
of press for that and interviews.
And there's a sense of, you know, everyone was celebrating
peace and freedom. And of course, the polls
weren't. The polls were celebrating
peace, but they had suffered huge fast losses and they didn't
get freedom at all. And I think it's often forgotten
the story of, I think when we think about resistance, we in
the Second World War, we tend tothink about France.
(10:41):
And there's incredible stories there.
And I've written some of that history myself.
But we're much less good at remembering what was going on in
Eastern Europe and Poland in particular.
And you know, there is a war going on at the moment.
Russia has invaded Ukraine. A lot of the cities that Zoe was
working in, and especially in the start of the war, she was
based in Lavuv, which was in eastern Poland, which is now
Laviv in Ukraine. And if we want to understand
(11:03):
this current conflict, we need to look at the roots.
We need to go back to the history and we we need to be
much better realizing that's part of our shared history, our
shared story. It never really ends, does it?
It makes you sad, but at the same time, books like yours
about these women also give me hope.
So. That's kind.
Thank you. Well, I am inspired by these
incredible women as well. Yeah.
(11:25):
Right. You've got to hope that there's
women out there still today, andthen that would do the same
thing, do the right thing at least.
Well, I think there are, I thinkthere are lots of Ukrainian
people, men and women serving atthe moment who are very much
along those lines. And I really hope that we're not
tested further. But I, you know, we talk about
the greatest Generation and theywere tested and they rose to
(11:46):
that test. You know, should it happen
again, I feel sure that within our society there are those
people who will come forward again.
Not me. I'm a complete coward.
I've got no sense of direction and no language skills.
But there are wonderful people in every generation.
I just hope we're not tested. I agree a little bit more about
your writing style. I can tell you do a lot of
research, a lot of it is directly in your books, but also
(12:09):
you make it engaging and fun. So how do you balance historical
accuracy and storytelling withinyour books if you know how to
answer that question? Yeah, I mean it's a tough one,
isn't it? I think it's really important if
you are writing non fiction and you say it's non fiction,
history has to be accurate. So I don't put things in my
books that are not available in the archives.
(12:31):
You know, any dialogue or any expression from the people in
the book has been captured in a letter or on tape in an
interview or whatever. So they're all direct quotes.
And I think someone told me off on an Amazon book review, they
said I bought this book. I was disappointed because the
last fifth of it is all footnotes.
And I was thinking, well, actually, that's quite good.
I did all that work. You know, that's great.
(12:52):
I was quite proud of that. But I also think it's really
important that this is read. I want people to read these
books. I want people to know the
history. So Zoe's life was complete page
Turner. So I really hope that people
will want to keep turning the pages when they're reading about
it. You know, I'm trying to bring
her vivacity to life, her courage, her determination and
the extraordinary circumstances in which she was serving
(13:14):
throughout the Second World War.I mean, it's really remarkable.
So I don't know. Virginia Woolf called it the
granite and the rainbow. The granite is the facts and the
rainbow is the interpretation and how you knit it together and
present it. So I try to do a bit of both.
But I take, I feel very much that I have a sort of bond of
trust with my readers. People aren't just giving me
1299. They're also giving me however
many hours it takes them to readthis book.
(13:36):
And I feel responsible to the women whose stories I'm telling.
And the readers who are then looking back and hopefully
learning a little from this and hopefully enjoying these books,
that it has to be accurate, but it has to be a good read as
well, I hope. I love paying notes because it's
like a reading list so I feel like the person who made that
comment is like not a real history fan.
(13:57):
Well, you know, I'm open to all so.
Yeah. So let's get into agent So a bit
more Agent So, of course, tells the extraordinary story of
Elsbiera Zavatska, the only woman among Poland's elite,
(14:17):
silent, unseen paratroopers. And this woman was formidable.
I was sending passages to my mother as I was reading it.
I sent her the passage where Zoeis on the train, and she's
realizing that sort of the wallsare closing in and the Nazis
might catch her. And so she just goes and throws
herself out of a moving train. I was just, I like, it was an
(14:40):
absolute page Turner. I feel like my heart was in my
throat. I was so excited to see what was
going to happen next. And at the same time, I was
like, just imagine being in thatsituation and being like, all
right, this is my decision. I'm going to jump out of this
train 1. Of the things I love about her
is when she throws herself off this it's a moving express train
travelling through the night from Krakow to Warsaw, and she
(15:00):
knows that the Gustavo are on her tail and it's not going to
stop. So she just has to take a leap
of faith and hope she doesn't smash her head open on a
Telegraph pole or roll under themetal wheels of the carriages
behind and all that. And she later told a friend that
in moments of mortal danger likethis, her thoughts turned to her
childhood reading, from which she took quite a lot of comfort.
(15:20):
And she really liked cowboy and Indian books.
So she thought these chaps, theythrow themselves up in the air
to try and slow down their momentum.
So she tried to jump up into theair, but it didn't really work.
She just crashed down really hard and really fast.
But she survived. She made it.
So, you know, if that's where she took her courage, all good
to her. And I love that that's what was
in her mind at that moment. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
(15:42):
Yeah. She was fearless and some
people, I think particularly men, found her abrasive at
times. She certainly had a style of
leadership where you know, she was pretty.
She didn't take any shit, I guess is the best way to say it.
I wonder if you could talk to usabout the ways in which her
personality, her leadership style, and the way she
interacted with those around herhelped or maybe hindered her
(16:04):
resistance work. You know, it's, I feel it is a
very gendered question and I am asked it quite often framed in
various ways. And I mean, I'm really glad to
use the word leadership because if you have quite an abrasive
male leader of an armed force ora unit, it tends to sort of
generate respect and some, or, and I feel inspired that I must
(16:25):
reach that level. And when Zoe is quite abrupt and
determined and very clear in hergoals and what needs to be done,
it tends to be referred to as abrasive and difficult.
And I, I think this is very mucha gendered thing.
So yeah, she took no prisoners. I mean, not in a literal sense.
She was a no holds barred kind of person, extremely determined.
(16:46):
And ultimately she delivered, you know, she got what she
wanted. So there's a bit when she, one
of her missions she sent as the personal emissary of the
commander in chief of the PolishHome Army, which is this massive
resistance force. And she's sent to represent him
to undertake 2 missions in London and to bring 2 very
important microfilm over. So she has to cross nearly 1000
miles of enemy occupied territory to get to Britain.
(17:07):
Eventually she makes it, having been shot at in mountains and
nearly drowned on a train and bombed and all sorts of things.
She makes it and she undertakes her first mission and it's to
sort out a unit of young men whoare not delivering sufficiently
quickly when they're organizing the British end of the land
(17:28):
Courier route. And so she is abrasive with
them. She's pretty tough and one of
these guys thinks he'll kind of knock the corners off her by
flirting with her. He says his ambition was peaked.
His name is Rum, that's his codename which I love.
He's a fantastic character, I'vegot to say.
There was a lot of information in his sons attic which his son
kindly got out and shared with me.
It was just brilliant. Rum married a woman who had
(17:50):
previously been Zoe's driver in Britain.
I was just like, oh, this is fantastic.
Anyhow, Rum decides to flirt with her before he's married and
he flourishes some silk stockings at her in a sunny park
one May morning. And he said, you know, her
response was startling. You know, she's just not
interested at all. But actually it's quite helpful
because she realises what the problem is.
Had she have worn these silk stockings in Warsaw, she'd have
(18:11):
been collected by the Nazis immediately, because the only
women wearing such expensive lingerie are the wives or the
mistresses of Gestapo officers. They're not available.
There isn't enough food available in occupied Poland.
They're not wearing silk stockings.
And she realises this guy, he's a brilliant soldier.
He's served with real heroism intwo campaigns already, but he's
(18:34):
never experienced occupation. And he kind of thinks it's the
same as London. And so, you know, they clock off
on a Friday at 5:00 and don't start work again till 9:00 on
Monday. And it leaves these couriers in
limbo for 48 hours with without any orders or receipt of their
stuff, their information, they've moved on and so on.
So she sorts him out completely.And he's fairly terrified of
(18:55):
her, really, and very grumbly about it.
But ultimately she sorts the system out, they start working
together and they end up becoming really good friends.
And they served alongside each other in the Warsaw Uprising in
August to watch over 1944 and became very good friends.
So yes, it was difficult, I think, for some of her
colleagues to adjust to her style.
But when they started seeing heras a soldier rather than a
(19:18):
woman, it all works very well. We love that part with the
stockings. I can see Mark smiling because
we talked about it previously. Yeah, I love it.
Yeah. So the other thing about Zoe is
that, I mean, as you already mentioned, she does survive the
war and she undergoes quite a lot more hardship under the
communist regime when the history of the resistance in
World War 2 was suppressed. And she's really not taking no
(19:41):
for an answer on that. And she's still trying to kind
of preserve this history and thememories of the people that she
cared about and all that kind ofstuff.
And she lived quite a long time.So we almost kind of get this
backdrop of a century of Polish history, which for me was
fascinating because they didn't know a lot about it.
I wonder, do you have a connection to Poland?
No, I don't. Well, I mean, minorly.
I when I finished university, I taught English as a foreign
(20:04):
language in Poland for a while as a volunteer with UNESCO.
In fact, I'd studied Polish politics as part of my first
degree. Then I went out there and became
fascinated. You know, it's that, it's that
thing that Warsaw is basically halfway between Moscow and
Berlin, and that's not a great place to be.
But it means that they have thisincredibly rich history as a
positive way of putting it. I mean, they have centuries of
(20:25):
being invaded and annexed and occupied by their very
aggressive, acquisitive neighbors, but also centuries of
defiance and resistance and liberation by themselves.
It's a heroic, determined, fascinating history.
And so I've been out there. The country is stunning.
It's an amazing place. So yeah, I've been fascinated by
it. But it was just a chance that
(20:46):
after my first book had done quite well, I got an agent,
which was fantastic. And he said, what are you going
to write next? I hadn't thought about it at
all. First book was a complete labor
of love. And so he said, what you're
interested in. So I said, well, this woman's
story wasn't told very well. And I'm a feminist and I felt
that the women's stories, history should be told in a more
professional way. And it's like, great.
Well, that's, you know, that's you've narrowed it by half.
(21:07):
What else? So I know I was quite interested
in Poland and it was actually him that came up with Christina
Scarbeck, also known as Christine Granville, born
Polish, died a British citizen, and she was the first woman to
serve Britain directly as a special agent in the Second
World War and also the longest serving agent, male or female,
for Britain in the war and one of the most high achieving.
She was absolutely incredible. So I knew I had to write her
(21:29):
story, but then I went off. I wrote about these two German
women that you mentioned in yourintro.
There were only two women who served as test pilots in the
Third Reich, and one was a fanatical Nazi, Hannah Wright,
but the other one was secretly part Jewish, secretly in the
resistance. Hannah Reich once tried to save
Hitler's life, and Melitta actually tried to kill Hitler.
(21:49):
So you got sort of 360° on what was going on inside Nazi Germany
there. And I thought that was an
amazing story that should be better known.
And then Zoe, I met a veteran ofthe Second World War, a
wonderful woman. I was at an event at the Polish
Embassy and lots of very important guests there.
It was all very interesting. And there was this little old
women sitting at the back. So I made a beeline for her and
(22:12):
started shouting to her. I said, may I ask what brings
you here? And she said that she was a
veteran of the Second World War.So she's often invited to these
embassy events. And she said the wine was very
good. So she liked to come.
And I, I immediately liked her and Hannah Chonotsuka.
And I said, if you're a veteran,can do you mind if I ask your
story? So I went to interview her
later. I didn't publish an interview
with her, I think, for History Today magazine some years ago.
(22:33):
And she had been a teenager, 16 year old in the Warsaw Uprising.
And she hadn't fought with a gunin hand.
But she had volunteered to go out across the city under siege
to try and get medical supplies for the field hospitals, which
tended to be in Cellars and basements.
And one day she ran out and, youknow, she's looking for
pharmacies, even people's housesthat have been ruined, anything
(22:54):
to try and get any medical supplies.
And one day she reached the university and she found 10
glass bottles of methylated spirits which could be used as
antiseptics. So she put them in her rucksack
and started running back and shewas caught in a German
incendiary bombing raid so far bombing raid.
And she saw these buildings start to shake and collapse
around her and then she felt something smashed into her back,
(23:16):
but she was protected by these glass bottles.
Only one of them broke and then she was running on.
She said she had this strange sensation of suddenly feeling
freezing in a burning St. because this methylated spirits
had soaked through her bag, soaked through her shirt, and it
was evaporating off her back. And she turned to me then and
looked me straight in the eye. And she said I knew that I was
going to die then because I was a petrol bomb.
(23:39):
And she just kept running. And eventually she made it back
to the field hospital. And she handed over the bottles.
And all they said was, we've broken one of these.
And that was what conditions were like in the Warsaw
Uprising. And she said, what are you doing
here? And I just felt really tiny.
You know, I'm not a veteran of anything.
And I'd written a book on Christina Scarbett, Christine
Granville. It's called The Spy Who Loved
(24:00):
Her. I was, I was there for that.
And she said, Oh yes, Christina,she was an amazing character.
But for goodness sake, why didn't you write about the real
heroine? Why didn't you write about Zoe?
And I had to say, well, who's Zoe?
So that was how I came across Zoe's story.
That's, that was the start of it.
So it's just chance, really. I've done two books written
about two women from Poland, butI've written about two women
from Germany and a woman from Britain as well.
(24:21):
So I think there are remarkable stories there though, that we
should know better. Yeah.
And that that kind of me into mylast question.
You have so many, I find anyway,really richly fleshed out
background characters. You mentioned Rum we discussed
offline as well. Amelia, one of those friends
who's kind of a tragic figure. I wonder, how do you decide
whose story to tell? Like if you know, how do you
(24:42):
decide who to spotlight? He's a really good question, so
I'm not normally asked that. So in on those tapes that we
mentioned with Andrew Djzynski, who had was the journalist who'd
interviewed her, she had said partly why he hadn't written is
that she had said I don't want abook just about me.
It was a team method. If any book's got to be written,
it's got to reflect the team. And I really felt that I in
honouring her character, her story, that she's right, I
(25:04):
needed to honour more than just one person.
So it's really about these five intertwined stories of women and
two two men. Rum is one of them and Yan
Rumvak, just Juransky is the other.
And they all knew each other at different stages.
They're all really good mates, so they're closely connected.
So I felt that the story meshed quite tightly.
It all held together. They weren't really random
people doing different things. So Amelia, who you mentioned is
(25:26):
Zoe's best mate, is her boss, but they end up becoming best
mates and they're chalk and cheese.
So she was a wonderful foil for Zoe as a character for me to put
in the book as well. Amelia's terribly romantic and
actually gets married during thewar, although whether she'd
divorce her first husband at that point, I don't know really.
It's not in the records because a lot of the records were
destroyed. And there's this wonderful scene
of her wedding and her honeymoonup in the mountains with the
(25:48):
partisan leaders and the freezing night.
Apparently her new husband threwan elk skin on the ground.
He was the partisan leader. So a little bit away from the
campus and privacy. And they obviously had a
ravishing, wonderful night underthe stars.
And in the middle of the night, she woke up and she looked, she
could see this belt of stars above her, and she tried to move
her head to look at the stars, and she couldn't move her head
(26:09):
because it was so cold. Her hair had frozen to the
forest floor. And she couldn't.
It's just this lovely story. And so she is a character.
She's a very different character.
This is very hard woman Zoe, very funny, but strong Zoe.
And what makes her sort of lovely and sweet is also what
ruins her in the end. It's fascinating.
So I wanted stories like those. And I mean, she works very
(26:31):
closely with though throughout the war, so it's not an add on.
I really felt it was important to mesh them.
And all of those stories are like that.
So, and they all come together in the Warsaw Uprising, and then
some of them make it through thewar and some don't, of course.
And I'll just interject real quick.
You do it so well too. Everybody gets a real arc and
you get to even the small characters.
(26:52):
You know what happens to them and you know where they end up.
And I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed the book a lot.
Very glad you're going to have to tell me, Mark, sometime about
some of the Dutch female resistors, of whom I know there
were many. But which of them needs a good
story you can tell me? That's a really good question.
I'll have a think about it actually.
You can come back to me on that one.
I'll. Probably see you at the reverse.
(27:15):
For them, I'll be there. To move on to another one of
your books, your First World WarTwo books this by her loved it's
the story of Christine Granvilleburned Christina Skarbeck, the
first one to work as special agent for Britain in World War
(27:39):
2. She's a very different character
from Zoe where Zoe is really straightforward and really kind
of tough and people find her kind of scary sometimes
Christine is I want to say really loved by many people and
especially also by men. So I was wondering specifically
if that has any influence on theresearch that is available about
(28:02):
her? In a sense it does.
I mean, there are lots of account.
Christina Scalbert made a big impression wherever she went.
Although someone did say she could turn her lamp on and turn
it off so she could disappear ina crowd if she needed to, which
was obviously a great skill for her to have in the war.
But she was a pre war beauty queen in Poland.
She was a runner up in the firstever Miss Poland competition.
(28:23):
She's a very vivacious and attractive personality.
And the book is called The Spy Who Loved because she loved
adventure and adrenaline. And perhaps it's ironic that it
was war that enabled a woman to really have a fully used life in
that way. She loved men.
She had two husbands. She had many lovers, many of
whom feature in the book, and they all had stories to tell
(28:45):
about her. So some of them when she
rejected them, tried to kill themselves.
Some of them were just madly in love with her all their lives
and whether or not they were married.
And so there's so it did give memore information, you know, from
these witnesses of her. But most of all, she loved
freedom for her country, the country of her birth, Poland,
for her adopted country, Britain, England, but also for
(29:06):
herself personally. And she didn't want to be tied
down to anyone particular bloke either.
She's very much ahead of her time.
She wanted independence in everyway.
And this makes a really fascinating character to follow
as well. And I, I think, very admirable.
I agree, I obviously I've yet toget to the end but I do feel
like good for her to use. She did love, like genuinely
(29:30):
loved all of them, but also she knew how to use that too.
I don't know if she loved all ofthem.
I mean she loved shagging all ofthem, but I don't know if she
allowed. Sorry.
I don't know if she actually loved them all.
She certainly wanted to have a good fun time, but I think lots
of fellas did. And you know, if you think
you've got six weeks to live, which was the average life
expectancy of a wireless transmitter behind enemy lines,
(29:52):
then you're going to use your time to the full, aren't you?
And if it was a fella, we wouldn't probably be having this
conversation. Now, she did use it.
There are times when, I mean, I think any agent serving behind
enemy lines would use every single skill or attribute they
had to advance their 'cause whenthey needed to.
So there are times when she did a bit of flirting to get her
(30:12):
way, and that's absolutely fair enough.
But of course it can also be very problematic if you are
pretty because it means your face is more memorable and
that's the last thing that you want if you're serving behind
enemy lines. So she would do a lot of
disappearing into the crowd as well.
And this was, you know, her being a bit flirty was just one
of her many skills. I mean, she was fully trained.
(30:33):
She was a member of SOE. She was trained alongside the
SOE across Britain in the Scottish Highlands and all over
the shop. And the course that she excelled
in apparently was silent killing, which is killing just
with a rope, a knife or your bare hands.
There's no evidence she actuallykilled anyone in the war, but
she did make very good use of hand grenades.
Favorite weapon was her commandoknife.
She was very highly trained, so she hadn't she brought a whole
(30:55):
lot of skills, but I think her best weapon was actually her
brain. And what you find is that she's
always talking her way into situations and talking her way
out of trouble. She's so quick thinking there's
a time where both she and her one of her lovers, Andre, have
been arrested and they're both being interrogated in Budapest.
And what she does was amazing. She was already feeling unwell
(31:17):
and her sweetheart was thinking how long is she going to last
because she's actually got the start of pneumonia.
But she decided to make a virtueof her apparent weakness, her
ill health. So she had a hacking cough
already. So she kept coughing and she bit
her tongue and and not a little but hard and repeatedly until
her mouth filled with blood and then when it coughed it looked
as if she was coughing up blood from her lungs, which is a
(31:39):
symptom of tuberculosis TB. And at this point there was no
cure for TB. The Germans were rightly
terrified of this disease. You know TB's carried by
waterborne droplets. So basically interrogation and
TB do not mix well. So they threw her out and
rightly suspecting that the man was her lover, they thought he
must have already got the disease but not yet showing the
symptoms. So they threw him out as well.
It was so brilliant. And later on, SOE was started
(32:02):
putting together handy tips and hints to give their trainees as
well. And in that there's a little
book that they made. And at one point it says in this
situation you could try biting your tongue to see if you can
represent having TB. She had fed that back, and
they're using that in her training.
So, you know, I don't think it'swrong to focus too much on her
(32:23):
being able to flirt at times, which she did at times.
Her real skill was her guts, hercourage and her quick thinking.
You know, she's incredibly fast.And that combined with her blunt
courage means she achieves so much, you know, including the
defection of an entire Nazi German Garrison in the Alps.
And on another time, saving the lives of three men who are about
(32:44):
to be executed in a football pitch, she manages to secure
their release. And another time she manages to
gets the first microfilm evidence of preparations for
Operation Barbarossa across Europe.
And they reached Churchill's desk, at which point he says,
you know, whoever this is, they're my favorite spy.
She is remarkable. So flirting is just a small part
of it. Yes, thanks for clearing that
(33:05):
up. Because I, that's where I was
going to go with this actually, because obviously when you title
you broke the Spy Who loved, people are going to think just
from the title, oh, this is a woman who loved men.
Yeah, it's a. It's a dot dot dot on the title.
I don't say anything. You know, it's, it's the spy who
loved and it is men and it is danger and it is adventure, but
(33:25):
it's also freedom. And I put that in at the end of
the book. Yeah.
Let's talk about the women who flew for Hitler.
Wow. So it's a dual biography of two
elite female pilots, Hannah Riceand Malita von Stauffenberg.
Both of them flew dangerous testmissions for the Nazi regime. 1
(33:49):
was a fanatically devoted Nazi, a woman who tried to organize a
kamikaze unit and was with Hitler in his bunker during his
final days. And the other was a brilliant
aeronautical engineer, a part Jewish woman who kept her head
down but tried to use her ties to the Nazi regime to protect
her family. So when I came into this book,
my initial special thought was Iwonder how she's going to weave
(34:10):
those stories together. And I wonder what made you
decide to tell both of those stories side by side.
Well. I good I knew the Hannah Wright
story. She is by far the better known
person and there had been a newish biography after I'd
signed my contract. Actually a new biography came
out of Hannah Wright and it saidbasically we've probably
(34:31):
misjudged her. It was very difficult being a
woman in 3rd right? She probably didn't know what
was going on and she's a real heroine.
She was incredibly brave and, you know, we should treat her as
such. And I just thought, no,
actually, she did know what was going on just because she was
female and she wasn't a member of the Nazi Party.
But lots of people weren't all sorts of reasons for that,
including very committed Nazis. And I found evidence that she
(34:51):
did know what was going on in Maginek concentration and
extermination camp. So, you know, I think just
because you're female doesn't get you off the hook.
You know, if we are feminists, we tell the truth.
We tell the whole story. So I thought that her story had
been quite, there's quite a lot of literature about her.
She comes not quite a lot, but Ithought perhaps I needed to sort
of pin down the fact that she isactually a complete Nazi.
(35:13):
Yes, she is incredibly brave andshe's a brilliant pilot, very
skilled, particularly with gliders, an extraordinary woman
in many ways, and also a racist and an anti Semite and a Nazi.
But I only decided to do the book when I came across this
other story of this other woman.Ironically, I came across
Melissa's story because Hannah had tried to hide it after the
war. Some years after the war,
(35:34):
Melissa had died 1st and and hersister Clara was thinking, why
does everyone just talk about Hannah Wright as the only Nazi
female test pilot? And when my sister was doing the
same work and more, because she was also an engineer, she was
designing and testing the aircraft.
So she decided to write Melissa's biography and she put
a note, an advert in the German newspaper saying if anyone's got
(35:55):
memories of working alongside her or knew her socially, please
get in touch. And Hannah Wright saw these
adverts and got in touch and sent the most vitriolic, deeply
unpleasant, threatening letters to militia sister saying that
she was, you know, she was ashamed.
She only had ambition because ofher racial burden and a hideous
terminology like this. It was absolutely grim.
(36:17):
And she said, I know a lot of bad stuff.
You won't want to come out and see the open.
So I'm not going to, you know, if you want me to contribute,
I'm going to tell all this bad stuff.
But you might want to just give up the idea now.
And Clara, unfortunately, was browbeaten and didn't tell her
sister's story. So that book wasn't written.
And I was like, oh, my gosh, here we have a woman, a part
Jewish woman, a brilliant pilot,brilliant aeronautical engineer.
(36:37):
But in the end, she does much more than trying to defend her
family. She's involved in one of the
most famous plots to kill Hitler.
But her story was completely left out as one of the big set
pieces of the war that we talk about.
And her name's never mentioned. And I came across her only
because Hannah had written theseletters that ended up in an
archive. I was like, oh, my goodness, who
is this other woman? And I managed to trace her
family. And she didn't have children,
(36:59):
but her nephew and his wife and their family went out to meet
them in Germany. And they showed me among the
stuff they had. They had a file basically it had
a little mark on it in German and they said it, they said what
this means is basically marked as domestic, you know, sent to
the, sent back to the family. All the men's papers involved in
this bomb plot were sent to Freiburg.
You know, they're all quite wellnamed, well known men.
(37:21):
But her papers, she was a woman,it was assumed when they were
doing the archiving, but she couldn't have any relevance
because she was female. And they just sent it back to
the family. And that's how women get written
out of history, not even at the book stage, but in the archive
stage. You know, if the papers aren't
there and we't trolling the archives, how are we ever going
to find these women? And I was just very lucky to
come across her name and her story.
So I knew then they were absolutely fantastic foils for
(37:42):
each other. You would think they were so
similar, pioneering female pilots, you know, bloody blah.
But actually they were diametrically opposed in almost
every way and they loathed each other, so apparently wouldn't
have a cup of tea together. But some flaming arguments
between them, some of which are recorded, which is marvellous.
So yeah, it just gave this fantastic opportunity for a book
(38:04):
to look at different size, different perspectives, and I
hope that makes it interesting. There is some absolute justice
in Hannah's attempts to bury Melita, being one of the reasons
why her story came to light ultimately.
Isn't that just fabulous? Yeah, it's great.
And I also think Hannah's story is topical in some ways.
You know, directly confronted bysomeone who had seen the
(38:26):
concentration camps, her response basically was fake
news. You know, even after the war,
doubling down on that. Yeah, that's what they call
denial. You know, she was smart.
She was intelligent. She'd seen the evidence.
But you know, she had huge courage physically.
She was testing these perilous new developed designs, but she
had absolutely 0 moral courage and never could let herself
(38:48):
question what I think at the back of the mind she probably
knew to be true. Yeah, absolutely.
I got that sense too. And Melita, on the other hand,
she, of course, was carrying theweight of this, well, almost
newly discovered Jewish ancestry, right?
They didn't sort of have that sense before the war, and then
they found out. Yeah, her.
Her father had been born Jewish,but he had converted as a
teenager, and he'd never discussed it with his children.
(39:10):
You know, he was a Protestant and he'd married a Protestant
family, and that was his identity.
You know, it was only after the Nazis come in that people start.
A lot of people started definingthemselves as Jewish because
they'd been defined as such, notbecause that's how they had seen
themselves previously. Yeah, so she's, you know, she's
carrying the weight of the secret identity.
And of course she and some of her family members were involved
(39:32):
in this high profile plot to assassinate Hitler.
But then she also spent most of the war working directly for the
Luftwaffe, working on, you know,technology to help a plane
buried better at night and that kind of stuff.
How did you find making sense ofher as a person?
Well, I mean, I think it's all there in the book.
I just think that people are complex.
You know, when I wrote that book, 1 reviewer said he was
(39:52):
embarrassed to read it on the train because it's called The
Women Who Flee for Hitler. It's like, well, you know, we
read biographies of Hitler and Stalin and we don't assume that
we therefore support them. This is about two.
I don't know if that's a gendered thing as well.
It's about two women who serve the. 3rd Reich.
But one of them ultimately resisted.
And I think that's really fascinating.
Somebody said to me, oh, great, you've written about good Nazis.
(40:12):
I was like, no, there are no good Nazis.
And somebody said, oh, wonderful.
I love the way you write about difficult women.
I get a bit fed up with this because I feel so cartoonish to
characterize in one, one word, difficult woman or, you know,
these are real women. And what I've tried to do is
present the complexity of their characters, the complexity of
the times in which they served, you know, under a dictatorship
(40:34):
in a time of war, with limited news outlets available to them
and so on. All of that.
And yet also they made moral choices.
And the fact they made very different choices underlines
that there was, you know, limited choice available, but
there was some. So I think I think that's
fascinating. I love the grey areas in
history. Yeah, I quite liked it too.
I, we always talk on the podcastabout how we like perspectives
(40:58):
of history that people haven't maybe necessarily thought a lot
about. And so reading that book, I
really, I got a lot out of it. So historically.
Like you said, in preparation for this, we could talk for
hours if we were to answer all these questions, but I really
appreciate you trying to give usa little bit of an overview of
some of the incredible women that are out there and whose
(41:22):
stories are waiting to be told. We also talk a lot.
What about obviously a movies and TV show?
So if any of your books were to be adapted to the big screen,
which one of those books would you wanted to be?
Well, I can't. That's like choosing between
your children. All of them.
They have all been under option at different times apart from
(41:42):
Zo. Zo's a new one.
And I'm actually talking to a production company at the moment
about Zo, so that's quite exciting.
And yeah, that would leave just one of them out of option at the
moment, but there's a sniff of interest there.
I mean, having said that, none of them have ever been made.
So it's very nice to receive a bit of option money, but it'd be
much better to actually have them on the big screen.
And I think it's high time, you know, everyone's talking about
(42:03):
James Bond. Who's going to be the new Bond?
Could there be a black man? Could there be a woman?
And everyone seems outrage and Idon't really get it.
It's a fictional character, right?
Though I don't think we need to claim a female Bond.
In any case. I think we have these women,
these real women who actually were much better than Bonds.
They weren't figments of someone's imagination.
They were out there doing the real job, really risking their
(42:24):
lives. And then we have series on TV
like SAS, Rogue Heroes, and which are sort of questionable
in some of the history anyhow, but basically convey something
that is fascinating and brings this to a new audience.
So I'm all in support. But there's one woman in there
who seem, it seems to be wearinga green satin being a sex
object. I think she killed someone once.
But you know, this is not what most of these women were doing.
(42:47):
They were out there playing hugely significant roles in
sabotage, in running escape lines, in hiding people, in
being couriers, in gathering military intelligence, in
delivering that intelligence, in.
So fighting with gun in hand. You know, why aren't those
stories being told? And I think there is a real
hunger for them. You know, I think there's an
appetite and I get lots of extraordinary emails.
(43:08):
One of the things I'm really proud of is that both men and
women read my books and they both get back to me and say,
wow, this is amazing history. So come on TV, people film
people, get in touch. Yeah, I can't wait to see a
movie right now. If it's made, it'll definitely
be on our podcast. Oh, thank you.
I'd love to come back if you'll have me.
Of course. I would love to get a book rack
(43:29):
if you have any World War Two books or maybe perhaps female
authors or historians that you would recommend.
Oh. So many.
I think Anne Seba is a brilliantauthor.
Just about, well, all the books of hers that I've read, which
are mainly the Second World War ones are brilliant.
She wrote an excellent book called Le Parisienne about the
women in Paris before and duringthe war and a bit after.
(43:49):
And her new book is on the women's orchestra of Auschwitz,
which I reviewed. And I think it is really
powerfully told, a really important and emotional story.
And she doesn't hesitate to ask the difficult questions, which I
think is so important. Caroline Moorhead is very good,
especially on Italy. If you're interested in the
Italian female partisans, there's been a couple of good
(44:10):
books on the French Resistance and the women out there as well.
So, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of good female writers doing
good stuff, yeah. Amazing.
Thank you so much. This has been a great chat.
Do you have anything else Martha, if you wanted to ask?
Maybe just run that slightly offthe beacon path just for fun.
If you could sit down with any of the women you wrote about and
(44:31):
have a cup of tea with them, whowould it be?
I don't really want to have a cup of tea with any of them
because I'm not sure that the subjects of my book want to meet
their biographer. If I did have a cup of tea, it
would have to be before the bookwas published so that I could
get all the dirt and make sure Igot it right.
But I would really love to be a family on the wall and to watch
(44:52):
them all without being seen. You know, I would love to follow
that round just to, you know, how accurate.
Did I really capture them in character?
Did I get all of the history correct?
I would love to witness them in action.
That's what I I would like. That's pretty good.
Do you want to promote anything at the very end of this podcast?
Is there anything that you want to plug other than all your
(45:14):
books? No, other than all my books, no.
I love all my books to be plugged as much as possible.
I've got a website, clairemolly.com, if people want
to find out where I'm giving talks or what else.
I'm writing articles and reviewsand things, that's all on there.
And, but basically, yeah, I justlove it.
If people read the book and if they could be kind enough to
leave a nice review anywhere, that's always really helpful as
well. Yes, everyone go and support
(45:34):
Claire so that we get way more books about women in World War
2, so I have lots to read. Thank you very much, I've really
enjoyed our chat today. Thank you so much for coming on.
No, it's a real pleasure. Thank you both.
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Rosie Doe
(45:57):
Reviewer. You can find us wherever you get
your podcast and rate US five stars.
You can send this episode to your friend and also recommend
Claire's books so we get more ofthem and we get movies and
shows. You can find us on Instagram at
Rosie Doe Reviewer Podcast or you can visit our website,
rosiedoereviewer.com. See you next week.
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