Character, intelligence, beauty, name, wealthy family - what more could you want? Before the war, Krystyna Skarbek was remembered as a participant in the 1930 Miss Polonia contest and a regular at Warsaw salons. Today, her fame is far more due to her spirit than her body.

Polish dramas and elections in the struggle for freedom
Even before the final collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a result of the partitions, Poles who wanted to serve their homeland in the future enlisted in the armies of foreign countries. After the partitions, Polish soldiers took an oath of allegiance either to Napoleon or to the monarchs of Berlin, St Petersburg or Vienna - they sought a way to fight for freedom or were conscripted into the armies of the partitioning powers.
The year 1939 brought another instalment of this drama. When the final outcome of the war was to be determined by millions of troops and economic potential, some Poles decided that they could do more harm to Germany if they fought in the ranks of the allied entente empire.

Krystyna Skarbek - the beginnings of resistance work
I don't know anyone braver than her. The only thing she couldn't do with dynamite was eat it.

This dilemma became the lot of Krystyna Skarbek (1908-1952). Five biographies have been devoted to her, and she became an inspiration for fiction. She descended from her father from a landed gentry family, her mother from an assimilated Jewish family of Łódź bankers.

When war broke out, she was in Kenya. Soon in London, through friends, she reported to the British her willingness to cooperate against the Germans. In December 1939, she became an intelligence officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, later becoming an associate of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British diversionary agency assisting the resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe. Krystyna Skarbek was the first and longest serving British agent during the Second World War.

Skarbek an agent for Her Majesty The Queen
Fearless, adrenaline-loving, she played with death many times. Algiers, Cairo, France, Warsaw (where she hooked up with her service partner, Andrzej Kowerski), Hungary - these are all points on the dangerous road that Krystyna Skarbek travelled during the war. Her incredible adventures could form the basis of several thriller films.

The information she gathered allowed her to pinpoint the date of the German attack on the USSR. In Hungary, Krystyna Skarbek organised escapes of interned Polish soldiers, who were then sent to the Polish Army in the West. Arrested with Kowerski in Budapest (January 1941), she bit her tongue and pretended to be in the final stages of tuberculosis until the Germans released both of them (this trick soon found its way into the manual for SOE agents).

In France, as Pauline Armand, she saved the arrested heads of a sabotage-diversion network from certain death. On another occasion, on the French-Italian border, she caused a garrison guarding an important mountain pass (consisting of some 200 Poles forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht) to switch to the Allied side. On hearing of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, she tried strenuously but unsuccessfully to be flown to her homeland.

Skarbek - demobilisation and the last years of her life
. Demobilised in April 1945, Krystyna Skarbek received personal thanks from Winston Churchill and a ridiculously modest severance package. Her later decorations, including the Order of the British Empire (1947), were equally symbolic. She found herself in the position of many other war-time heroes. She was not looked after by England or France, let alone communist Poland.

She experienced the 'horrors of peace' and was unappreciated and unneeded. Krystyna-agent became a hotel maid, a waitress, a saleswoman in the famous Harrods and a telephone operator. She was employed as a stewardess on liners travelling between London and the Union of South Africa. On one of these she met Madeleine Masson, her future biographer, and - allegedly - Ian Fleming, the future author of James Bond novels. According to some, Fleming was said to have been inspired by Skarbek's stories when creating the characters of Vesper Lynd from Casino Royale (1953) and Tatiana Romanova from From Russia, with Love (1957).

Despite her many partners, Krystyna Skarbek never achieved happiness and stability in her personal life. Her life came to a tragic end in 1952, when she was stabbed to death in a London hotel by a steward she had met on a ship, Dennis Muldowney, whose advances she had earlier rejected.

Krystyna Skarbek's grave
After Krystyna Skarbek's death, Andrzej Kowerski, together with a group of her close friends, took charge not only of organising her funeral (she was buried in soil smuggled in from Poland), but also of preserving the memory of the achievements and merits of the Polish agent in the British service.

When Kowerski died in 1988, his ashes were placed in Skarbek's grave. Their common resting place at St Mary's Catholic Cemetery in London's Kensal Green was extensively restored in 2013, on the initiative of the Polish Heritage Society. The rededication of the restored grave was accompanied by a salute of honour by soldiers of the British Armed Forces in the presence of diplomats, military and veterans from France, Poland and the UK, among others.

Commemoration of women-agents
The figure and services of Krystyna Skarbek were also commemorated at the Tempsford SOE memorial to the female agents and RAF Special Squadrons - a memorial to female agents of the British services and collaborators of Allied intelligence during the Second World War - on the site of the former RAF base in Tempsford (Bedfordshire), about 70 km north of London.

On the two planes of the stone cuboid are listed the women agents, among them: Krystyna Skarbek-Granville (named after British relatives) and the only female 'cichociemna' Elżbieta Zawacka. Of the 75 commemorated, 20 paid with their lives.

The memorial was unveiled on 3 December 2013, by Prince Charles of Wales with the attendance of, among others, diplomatic representatives of the 12 countries from which the female collaborators of the British secret services came, veterans and relatives. The commemoration was created in a wave of national discussion about the underestimation of women's role in victory in the Second World War.

Christine Skarbek memorabilia
In 2017, a bronze bust of Krystyna Skarbek was placed in the Ognisko Polskie - a legendary Polish émigré club - in Kensington, London, where she used to come to dances after the war. It was made by Ian Wolter (husband of Mulley Clare, one of Skarbek's British biographers).

In 2020, on the other hand. Krystyna Skarbek (a.k.a. Christine Granville) was honoured with a prestigious so-called blue plaque (an oval plaque placed in a public place to commemorate the connection between a location and a famous person or historical event). The plaque was unveiled on the facade of the building at 1, Lexham Gardens - the site of the tragic death.

Krystyna Skarbek lived here between 1949 and 1952, in what was then the Shelbourne Hotel. The building, located in the Kensington district, was then managed by the Polish Relief Society. When the building was bought by the Polish community in 1971, Krystyna Skarbek's suitcase (with her clothes, documents and the dagger of SOE agents) was found in the hotel storage room. The dagger, alongside her medals and documents, is now on display at the Polish Institute and the General Sikorski Museum in London.