Titans of History

ODETTE SANSOM

1912–1995

I am a very ordinary woman to whom a chance was given to see human beings at their best and at their worst

Odette Sansom, reflecting on her experiences

Odette Sansom represents the courage of ordinary—yet extraordinary—people during the Second World War. Although she was awarded the George Cross and the Légion d’honneur for her work behind enemy lines during the Second World War, Odette Sansom described her occupation in Who’s Who as “housewife.” Known simply as Odette, she never viewed her unflinching bravery in Nazi-occupied France as anything out of the ordinary.

Born in France, in 1931 Odette Brailly, as she then was, married an English hotelier, Roy Sansom, whom she had met when he stayed at her Picardy home to improve his French. The couple subsequently settled in England and had three children together. Almost a decade later Odette, living a quiet life as a London housewife, responded to a War Office request for all French-born residents to provide any photographs they might have of their homeland. When Odette sent in her holiday albums, the War Office called her in to see whether she might be able to help them with more than snapshots. She was asked to join the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, where she received her basic training, but this was a really a cover for her recruitment into the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the covert British organization that sent agents to occupied Europe to work as spies and saboteurs.

Although her recruiters had been impressed by her vivacity, her intelligence and her desire to redeem France from the disgrace of its capitulation in 1940, her trainers at SOE were at first doubtful that Odette had what it took to be a secret agent. But eventually, noting her steely determination, they selected her for work in occupied France.

She was landed by boat in Antibes in October 1942, where she met her group leader, Peter Churchill. Odette was meant to join a new circuit in Burgundy, but Churchill, with whom she would fall in love and eventually marry, instead secured permission for her to stay with his circle. Using the code name Lise, Odette worked as Churchill’s courier for over a year, helping him to transmit vital information to and from England.

In April 1943 Odette and Churchill were betrayed by a double agent. Odette had been suspicious of “Colonel Henri” as soon as she met the German officer who claimed that he wanted to defect to the Allies. Churchill, when he returned by parachute from London where he had been receiving instructions, was equally suspicious. But by then it was too late. A more indiscreet member of their circle had already confided in Sergeant Bleicher of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), and Odette and Churchill were arrested.

In fourteen separate interrogations in Fresnes Prison in Paris, as her toenails were torn out and her spine branded with a red-hot iron, Odette refused to alter her story, or to reveal the identities or whereabouts of two other SOE officers the Gestapo were determined to find. Sticking obdurately to the quickly fabricated story that she was married to Peter Churchill, she insisted that she, not Churchill, was the leader of the group. She managed to convince her interrogators of the truth of this by agreeing that she, rather than Churchill, should be shot. As a result, Churchill was only interrogated twice. Odette was sentenced to death.

In 1944 she was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was to be executed. That she survived was partly down to the fact that she and Churchill had convinced the Gestapo that his uncle was the British prime minister, Winston Churchill. Nevertheless, Odette was held in solitary confinement and treated brutally. When the Allies landed in France, she was kept in complete darkness for three months as a punishment. But believing her to be well connected, the camp commandant used Odette as a hostage when he fled before the advancing Red Army. As soon as they reached Allied lines, Odette denounced him.

Odette emerged from prison gaunt, ill and, in the words of a doctor’s report, “in a state of high nervous tension due to maltreatment.” Yet in the years after her release she refused ever to indulge in bitterness or recrimination and instead devoted herself to working with charities dedicated to healing the physical and mental wounds of war. She made an emotional return to Ravensbrück in 1994 to unveil a plaque to her SOE comrades who had died there.

Odette was awarded the George Cross, England’s highest nonmilitary honor, and appointed to France’s Légion d’honneur. She was idolized in the press, and her actions were immortalized in the 1950 film Odette. But she remained a self-effacing heroine, stating that she accepted the George Cross only on behalf of all those who had fought in the war, adamant that it was the luck of her survival, and not any particular bravery, that had secured it.

Odette married Churchill in 1947, but the marriage was not a success. She was, however, blissfully happy with her third husband, Geoffrey Hallowes, another ex-SOE man, until her death in 1995.

She ranks with other female heroines of the Second World War, who also worked for SOE: Violette Szabo who parachuted into France, but was captured and survived weeks of Nazi torture before being executed; Hannah Senesh, Hungarian Jewess, poet and spy who, captured in Hungary, withstood torture and was shot; and the New Zealander Nancy Wake, who parachuted into France and survived the war after killing Germans with her own hands. The Germans called her the White Mouse. She was the most decorated woman of the Second World War.