The FORGOTTEN STORIES of WWII's BRAVEST SPIES - Kate Vigurs

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1:00You're about to make a trade. Which you do listen to? Is it get optioning those options? Or let's do a little research. Learn more at finra.org slash trade smart. Once the Nazis occupied Hungary in its entirety, I mean, it's the worst and quickest deportation of Jews. So Hannah has this passion in her heart that she wants to help the Jews as much as she can. and when she finally gets to Hungary, they swim from Yugoslavia to Hungary. And just as they get there, the Arrow Cross, who the Hungarian fascists see them, and one of the guys that she's with panics and shoots himself, and it results in the rest of them being arrested.

1:42And Hannah is heartbroken because she'd said, if the Jews only know one person tried to help them, at least they know. Somebody was thinking of them. She's then put into prison, accused of being a spy. Her mother is arrested, and the guys say to her mother, where's your daughter? And she says, she's safe from you. Thank God. She's in mandate Palestine. And then they bring in her daughter, bloodied, bruised, beaten up. And Hannah was put on trial. She's accused of being a spy and she shot. She's 23 years old and she is executed. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Kate Viger.

2:16She's a historian and an award-winning author and academic, but she's out with a great book called Mission Europe, The Secret History of the Women of the SOE. So Kate, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for coming on. You know when they say you can't judge a book by its cover? I bought your book because of the cover. I know that's probably embarrassing to tell you that, but I love the cover. I'm like, all right, this looks like a really cool book. And of course, it lived up to all of my expectations. But before we get into it a bit, tell us a little bit about your your background and why you went into this direction for your career.

2:56So in terms of background, I studied drama at university, first of all, and then I went to work in a museum that employed actors. And one of my characters, I wanted to do French resistance. Someone said, have you heard of special operations executive? And I think the expression is I fell down a rabbit hole, which I'm still down some 25 years later. So I just fell in love with these women, everything about them, be they good, bad, or indifferent, really. I just want to tell their stories. So I went ahead and did a PhD in history and then wrote my first book, Mission France. And I thought, it's not just France.

3:35We need to look at the rest of Europe here. And so just kept going and kept going. So you study drama. You see, if you grew up in an Italian family, you wouldn't have had to study drama because you would have learned drama at a very early age. See that, Kate? All right. But your first book, Mission France, okay, was focused on F section. So I've got young viewers, so they don't know the different acronyms and so forth. So tell us what F section is. Tell us what SOE means. Let's start there. Then I want to get into the guts of the book. Sure. So Special Operations Executive, SOE, was founded in the summer of 1940.

4:14So we're looking at the fall of Western Europe. So France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. And SOE was set up with a remit, which was to set Europe ablaze. So we're not talking spies or intelligence gathering, we're talking sabotage, slowing down the German war effort as much as possible. And then SOE operated wherever the Nazis were, basically, right the way across Europe. They even went into the Far East. I'm not a specialist in that side, but they went there as well. So wherever there's an occupying force, men, and by 1942, women are sent out into occupied Europe, they have to parachute or go by a landing plane.

5:00But most of them parachute in with this aim to slow down the German war effort. So F section covers part of France, which it was like a British controlled unit that went into France, men and women. So, you know, I had, I think you know who she is. I had Sonia Purnell on to talk about Averill Harriman's, the Doyenne. I mean, the great uh i mean she's a phenomenal woman she also wrote a book on clementine churchill and obviously she wrote this book on pamela churchill harriman uh why do you think women i mean women had such a huge impact on the outcome of that war why do you think that we underwrite about them i know there's the obvious reasons of uh you know male chauvinism and things like that but i mean the stories are there so why why why are they underreported it's really hard to say i mean some of the women did become quite well known at the time so for example if they were given a medal at the end of the war their story would be in the newspapers for the women who lost their lives their names might have come out in the war crimes trials but those names are kind of the ones that came to the fore and other women who maybe didn't get medals or didn't do quite as well or for whatever reason just didn't get pushed up to the front some of them very self-effacing they didn't want to you know push themselves into the limelight so it's for people like me to say wait a minute they don't belong in the footnotes they belong in the main story um it's very difficult to say And I think at the end of the Second World War, everybody had an experience of the war.

6:43Everybody had somebody who'd fought or they'd experienced the home front or they'd done war work. And there was this kind of lethargy around it. People were sick of talking about it. So a few people came forward and became heroines and the rest of them just kind of disappeared. So it's kind of hard to say. I also wonder if they didn't talk about it because they've been fighting for the right to live a normal life. And when they got that normal life, that's what they wanted to do. Go ahead, get a job, have children, get married. You know, it's so interesting. I was going to bring that up to you.

7:19My uncle fought on Normandy Beach, never, ever wanted to talk about it. And his attitude was what you just said. He wanted to return to a normal life. So sort of a follow-up question on this. Is this a cultural thing indicative of the 1940s and 50s and the way people were raised and the way people thought about their military service or their civic service, which is in many ways very different from today? How do you feel about that? How do you feel about that statement? I do think there's a cultural thing. I also think that maybe it's hard to understand. So if you have someone, say your uncle, who's been on the D-Day beaches, how do you convey that to somebody who wasn't there?

8:03And if you do talk about it, you know, I don't know if it's the same in the States, but certainly when I was growing up, it's, oh, God, granddad's telling his war stories again type thing. um maybe these people come together and talk about it when they're with their comrades when they're with people who understood it went through it with them so they can have that camaraderie perhaps um but yeah it's very much a cultural thing they went through it there was no counseling there's no such word of stress in the 1940s people just came home and had to get back on with everyday life. Something you write about, which I find, I mean, I'm, you know, I have a daughter, you know, I have, I have five children, Kate.

8:46Wow. Not that you're my therapist, but you're cheaper than my therapist. I'll share this with you. I have five children. I have four sons and one daughter. Who do you think is my favorite? Okay. So it's obviously my daughter and too bad on the sons for me telling them that, but, but I think about her and I write, I'm reading your book and I'm thinking about the training. I'm thinking about the risk. I'm thinking about the betrayals that happened on the job and the deaths and the, you know, tell us about the type of woman that goes into this, the type of woman that gets trained to do this. You know, give us some of the personalities that you learned about while you were writing this great book.

9:28But the amazing thing is they're all very different personalities and SOE clearly sees something in them. You don't have to be a certain age. You don't have to be from a particular background. They're not worried about your religion. They really are sort of the most equal opportunities employer that could possibly have existed in the 1940s. Really, they just wanted you to have a language skill, whichever country you were going into, a patriotism to get rid of the Nazis. and the most important thing was to be able to blend in. We don't want people who were, look at me, aren't I amazing? I'm doing this.

10:07It's just buckling down and getting on with it and blending in. That's the most important thing. So in Mission Europe, you're going to find all sorts of women. You have Trix Tervant. She was an air stewardess for Royal Dutch Airlines. She had no intention of getting into resistance work and it's only really when the aircraft were grounded and she lost her job she's kind of wondering what to do and someone says hey you'd be a really good courier and she says okay I'll I'll try that and she tries it again and again and eventually ends up in England and wants to go back to the Netherlands so she has to learn how to parachute to get back in and you find the story time and again it's people who are trying to help their fellow countrymen to escape these could be prisoners of war they could be wanted persons they could be jewish it could be any number of reasons they're trying to get out and and these women are kind of there they're helping them and somehow they end up in england and want to go back or um some of them have a real skill i think one of my favorites is a girl called jeanne bowick who um is an explosives expert and she teaches the boys how to blow up railways, which is pretty important ahead of D-Day.

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12:36Named number one by Wirecutter by using promo code OPENBOOK at checkout. That's A-U-R-A, frames.com, promo code OPENBOOK. This deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast. So order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. When I was a kid reading history, I read the history like a Hollywood script. I said, okay, we're the good guys, right, Kate? At least I'd like to say, I don't know. I don't know if we're still the good guys, Kate. Someone give me the memo, but we were the good guys. And then what we're trying to do is fight evil people and trying to beat evil people back and win for the forces of good and the democracy.

13:20That's how we at least got trained or thought about life. but now as I've gotten older and I've gotten more humbled by life and perhaps wiser or more mature I realize how much vagary and uncertainty goes into all this and I think one of the brilliant things that you did in this book is like you let us know that things are on a hair's edge okay where if it goes right well then the mission is going to happen and things are going to open up for the allies if it goes wrong to be a big setback and perhaps a reversal in the war tell us about some of those situations that you uncovered. What does it tell us about history in terms of the hairpin turns that history can make while we're trying to make the history into a Hollywood script?

14:06It's not black and white, is it? At all. It's very, very difficult. My mind turned to one of the women, Mathilde Carre, as you were talking about that. To sort of bring it down to a personal level. you know she is part of a massive network in Paris her circuit leader is arrested she's arrested the next day and she's told work with us work with the Germans work with the Abwehr or we'll shoot you how do you make that decision how I'm very judgmental about her but I shouldn't be because how do you make that decision and then that decision is multiplied again and again and And again, to look at how a country reacts to the occupation.

14:50And it's not as easy as you think. None of it is. It's not the Nazis were evil. Obviously, they were, of course. That's not what I mean. But it's how you react to it, how you choose to fight against it. Or do you choose, maybe like Denmark, just to toe the line and see where it takes you? But on the personal level, I find it very, very difficult that people were given this decision, become a double agent. or your life's over. Some of them turn on a hair thin, like you say, and others, no, I'm not going to turn. I'm not going to do what you want me to do. And they pay for it with their lives. I mean, to me, it's extraordinary.

15:31And I don't mean to be an equivocator, but it's understandable too, if someone's threatening your life that you capitulate. So, you know, my heart went out to those people as well. Um, you've got, you know, I don't know, I get, I guess, uh, I guess there was a level of training here that you went into that also fortified me into thinking, wow, I mean, it's not just you show up one day and you're in the SOE, you've got to go through all this training. So, so tell us about the training and tell us how these women got prepared. So they would go through an interview process. They weren't necessarily told in interview exactly what was going to happen to them.

16:16And the training changed throughout the war, but I'll just give you an overview. They would start off in something called preliminary training. They were given a uniform, normally as a British unit called the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, a khaki uniform, which then gave them a cover to tell their families that they'd joined up and they were going away. And it gave them a salary too. And in preliminary training, they're trying to weed out unsuitable recruits. So it's things like physical training, running elementary firearms, Morse code, learning to recognize uniforms, theory lessons. The interesting thing about preliminary training is that the agents had an open drinks cabinet in the evening.

17:00So they were actively encouraged to drink. Not for any reason other than they wanted to see what happened. if they'd had a little bit too much to drink, would they talk too much? What language would they talk in? You know, if you're going to speak plainly after a glass of wine, you're not going to be a good agent. So if they passed that training, they then went up to the west coast of Scotland. I'm literally just back from up there where the rain was horizontal and the wind was in your face. And that's why they chose it. They wanted agents to toughen up. And up there, they They learned something called instinctive shooting.

17:36So rather than shooting at a target, it's here, there and everywhere. Silent killing, close combat, ways of bringing down German sentries. They learned explosives. They learned how to live with the tougher side of the resistance. Some women then became wireless operators. By wireless, I mean a sending and receiving transmitter. It's hidden inside a suitcase. Brilliant example in the Spy Museum in Washington, if you get there. And then these were used as a means of communication between occupied territory and London. So a way of asking for agents, for money, for equipment. When's D-Day going to be?

18:14That kind of stuff. And then parachute training. Actually, the other way around. Parachute training came first. I don't know if you've ever parachuted. Not for me. Definitely not for me. I'm afraid of heights. I mean, I don't know why I'm admitting all my weaknesses to you on this podcast, but I'm afraid of heights as well as everything else. Oh, I just can't think of anything worse than hanging out at the side of an aircraft and someone saying jump. Oh, my God. But that's what they did. So I'm not – Night jumps, day jumps. Let's talk about one of these jumpers, though. I'm probably not going to pronounce her name right, but in the book, is it Hannah Zines?

18:54How would you say her name? Zinesh. Hannah Zinesh. Okay, Zinesh. So she's a Jewish Hungarian agent. She's recruited. And tell us a little bit about her. She's a parachutist. She's a Jew. So she's trying to escape this anti-Semitism, the scourge of death for Jews in Europe. And she's tortured and captured. And give us some of the detail there. I thought this was one of the most painful, most absorbing stories in your book, by the way. Me too. So Hannah was born in Budapest in Hungary. She suffered. There was a lot of anti-Semitic feeling within Europe before the Nazis came to power. They harnessed it.

19:43So she suffered a lot of anti-Semitism and she wanted to fight against it. So she joined the Zionist movement in 1939. she emigrated to Mandate Palestine, where she worked on a kibbutz for a couple of years. Now, in Mandate Palestine, there were a lot of emigres or kibbutzniks. And there was a fighting unit called the Palmach, which wanted to recruit men and women, they didn't mind who, parachute them back into enemy occupied Europe. Their primary aim was escape and evasion for Allied prisoners of war, but they had a secondary mission, which was to help the Jews of Europe. It hadn't got critical in Hungary until just as Hannah was about to go in.

20:33And once the Nazis occupied Hungary in its entirety, I mean, it's the worst and quickest deportation of Jews. They even built a new ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau for the Jews to be deported. So Hannah has this passion in her heart that she wants to help the Jews as much as she can. And when she finally gets to Hungary, unfortunately, they swim. They swim from Yugoslavia to Hungary. And just as they get there, the Arrow Cross, who the Hungarian fascists see them, and one of the guys that she's with panics and shoots himself. And it results in the rest of them being arrested. And Hannah is heartbroken because she'd said if the Jews only know one person tried to help them, at least they know somebody was thinking of them.

21:22She's then put into prison, accused of being a spy. Her mother, I don't quite know how that bit of the story comes together, but her mother is arrested. And the guys say to her mother, where's your daughter? And she says, she's safe from you. That God, she's in Monday, Palestine. And then they bring in her daughter, bloodied, bruised, beaten up. Um, and Hannah was put on trial. She's accused of being a spy. Um, and she shot, she's 23 years old and she is executed. And it breaks my heart. There's so many reasons to, there's so many reasons to love your book, but what I love about it is the good and bad outcomes in the book.

22:05You know, overarching outcome. We win the war. We repel the scourge of Nazism. They liberate the camps, et cetera. but these women some of them make it through the war and some of them are you know unfortunately ending great tragedy um and they disappear from history that's the sad thing they disappear from history exactly which is why i wanted to bring you on i wanted to talk about them and i want to bring up one more before i switch topics because these are the women in your book when i was reading the book i said okay i gotta ask i gotta ask you kate about these women so i want to bring up one more, Elaine Madden.

22:44Let's talk a little bit about her. She's Belgian-born. She's an agent in the Belgian section of the SOE. She's also a parachutist. Let's talk about her because this is related to the V1 and V2 rocket sites as well. It is, yes. So Elaine Madden, yeah, Belgian-born, as you say. Her father worked for the Imperial War Graves Commission, which was tasked with sorting the grey yards of the First World War. So he had a horrible job, which made it a difficult upbringing for her, especially when her mother died. But yes, she escapes. Oh, my Belgian's terrible. Pop ringer. When the Germans invade, she manages to get to Dunkirk, which is crazy.

23:27And she dresses as a British soldier and manages to stow away on a boat. They notice she's a woman because they spot her shaky ankles. but she makes it to the UK she trains up and she goes back into Belgium and one of her jobs is to work out where the rocket sites are that are then retargeting London, so we've had the Blitz with the Luftwaffe but now they've got rockets and they can obliterate huge parts of London without even having anyone present she also is put in charge of the prince regent so the king has gone into exile but she doesn't know he's a prince regent so she spends a lot of time dissing the king dissing the royal family uh saying how lazy they are shouldn't they be doing something for belgium and then after liberation she realizes just who they are um but they laugh it off and then she has this amazing job um of helping liberate the concentration camps and what she must have seen and what she must have experienced is unbelievable really i mean it's to me to me these stories are unbelievable but also the willingness to do this and the willingness to push yourself into this zone and so um why why do you think it's so important to tell these stories now and how do they change our broader understanding of the resistance and women's roles in the second world war in general What I'm aiming for is parity.

25:05I want the women's stories to be up there with the men's. And at some point it will just become history. It won't be women's history, men's history. It will just be our history, our common history. I think it's important now. I mean, the political climate that we are all in at the moment is less than satisfactory. And I really want people to know that they can make a difference. These women, they were normal women. They were shopkeepers, hairdressers. They were 19. They were 51. There was the thing that unites them, I guess, is this patriotism and this language skill. but really i want people to be inspired by them to look up to them they're more than influencers they've they they did something amazing and it's something we should be grateful for and possibly aspire to and i know that's a big aim but if we don't aim high uh we'll never get there i love i mean that was that was my feeling about your book you know i i but i also love hanging out with the brits can i tell you why you describe the political environment as less than satisfactory.

26:14As a New Yorker, I would say that it sucks. Okay, but I love the fact that you're so diplomatic with this whole thing, you know? Yeah, understatement is what we do in Britain very well. I'm going to test that out on my other podcast, you know, that it's less than satisfactory. Okay, so we're down to the five words. Again, the title of the book is Mission Europe, the Secret History of the Women of the SOE. And so we're down to our famous five words. I'm going to say the word and I want you to think of what comes to your mind. Okay. As we close out this podcast, if I say the word history, you say what?

26:52There's a quote from a play, which is, it's women following men round with a bucket or a pail, as you would probably say. I hear history. You may hear her story. It's interesting, right? But I mean, I love that. Okay. I say the word woman or women. You say what? Role model. Okay. Well said. Mission France. Pride. What about Mission Europe? Oh, goodness. That's a tough one. Can I be more proud? Inspirational. Inspirational. I mean, to me, I think that's what I hear. I hear inspirational and courageous. If there's a word beyond the word courageous, that's the word that I'm thinking of. It's almost like an unconditional love of freedom that pushes these people to do these things.

27:39Okay, this is the last word, and I'm going to give you the last word. I say SOE, you think of what? Heroes. Amen. Listen, this is a phenomenal book. We're hearing from Kate Vigers. She is the author of Mission Europe, The Secret History of the Women of the SOE. What a great book. And what are we doing next before I let you go, Kate? What's on tap? Oh, there's a lot in my mind. I would like to write about the women behind these women now, other women who were the wireless operators who packed the parachutes and who served in North Africa and Burma and Italy. But I also have a fiction book bubbling away in my head as well.

28:21So we'll just have to wait and see. Okay. Well, I wish you great success with those. Thank you so much for joining us today on Open Book.

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