Christine Granville

Born Krystyna Skarbek in Warsaw, Poland in 1915 , the daughter of Count Jerzy Skarbek, a Polish aristocrat and the granddaughter of a wealthy Jewish banker in the Goldfeder family. Was educated in a convent in Warsaw and at age 17 was crowned Miss Poland after winning a beauty contest.

Was married briefly but divorced her husband soon thereafter. Remarried in , this time to Georg Gizycki, a writer who was twice her age. After they were married, they were living in Africa, where he was working on a book, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The couple immediately travelled to britain and she volunteered to work with British intelligenc services (her husband joined the Free Polish Services and was later killed in combat).

Krystyna was brought into the Special Operations Executive brance of British inteligence, recruited because of her intellect and her fluency in several different languages. Was given the name Christine Granville by SOE and used it for the rest of her life. She was to work with resistance group in fighting the Nazi invasion and received special training in espionage.

Was assigned to Budapest where she worked under the cover of being a journalist. Her real purpose was to aid Polish refugees to escape across the border. An excellent skiier, she skiied several times across the Tatra Mountains into Poland to retrieve escaped Polish prisoners of war and bring them out of the country. She would go on to establish several escape routes, bringing Polish refugees back into England.