THE NYTIMES has a report by John F. Burns, "Eileen Nearne, Wartime Spy, Dies at 89". It's an obituary of a very brave woman. You see, Eileen was a member of England's S.O.E. (Special Operations Executive), and was a radio operator in occupied France, in WW2.After she died earlier this month, a frail 89-year-old alone in a flat in the British seaside town of Torquay, Eileen Nearne, her body undiscovered for several days, was listed by local officials as a candidate for what is known in Britain as a council burial, or what in the past was called a pauper’s grave.
But after the police looked through her possessions, including a Croix de Guerre medal awarded to her by the French government after World War II, the obscurity Ms. Nearne had cultivated for decades began to slip away.
Known to her neighbors as an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past, she has emerged as a heroine in the tortured story of Nazi-occupied France, one of the secret agents who helped prepare the French resistance for the D-Day landings in June 1944.
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Ms. Nearne, known as Didi, volunteered for work that was as dangerous as any that wartime Britain had to offer: operating a secret radio link from Paris that was used to organize weapons drops to the French resistance and to shuttle messages back and forth between controllers in London and the resistance.
After several narrow escapes, she was arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944 and sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp near Berlin, a camp that was primarily intended for women, tens of thousands of whom died there.
Ms. Nearne survived, though other women working for the Special Operations Executive were executed in the Nazi camps.
As she related in postwar debriefings, documented in Britain’s National Archives, the Gestapo tortured her — beating her, stripping her naked, then submerging her repeatedly in a bath of ice-cold water until she began to black out from lack of oxygen. Yet they failed to force her to yield the secrets they sought: her real identity, the names of others working with her in the resistance and the assignments given to her by London. At the time, she was 23.
An incredibly brave, quiet woman — and about as far as you can get from Stevie and Airshow.
I couldn't help but notice this particular quote: "the Gestapo tortured her — beating her, stripping her naked, then submerging her repeatedly in a bath of ice-cold water until she began to black out from lack of oxygen."
ReplyDeleteSounds a lot like the treatment meted out to various folks in the middle east and central Asia in the GWOT, n'est pas?
Might seem petty, but it wasn't England's SOE. A lot of folk from the other three countries of the UK served as well as a hell of a lot of others who were native to the various countries under the heel of the jackboot.
ReplyDeleteBut apart from that you are right, Harper and McKay are cowardly fuckwits and don't deserve to even be mentioned in he same post as this real hero/
Poly you hit the nail right on the head. Rove, Bush and Cheney are no different to the SS/Gestapo pigs who tortured this woman. She was a patriot and a defender of humanity, they are totalitarian pigs.