Princesses Behaving Badly (37 page)
Read Princesses Behaving Badly Online
Authors: Linda Rodriguez McRobbie
According to one of the assassins, a soldier named Ryabov, her murderers chose an abandoned half-flooded mine shaft some 65 feet deep outside a small village in the Russian countryside for their evil deed. Ryabov recalled that the princess and the others were thrown down the shaft in the hopes that they would drown or die in the fall; they didn’t, so
their executioners tossed a hand grenade after them. Incredibly, the victims were still alive, so the soldiers tossed in another grenade. “And what do you think—from beneath the ground we heard singing! I was seized with horror. They were singing the prayer: ‘Lord, save your people!’ ” recalled Ryabov. “We had no more grenades, yet it was impossible to leave the deed unfinished. We decided to fill the shaft with dry brushwood and set it alight. Their hymns still rose up through the thick smoke for some time yet.”
About three months later, White Army soldiers, the anti-Bolshevik forces, discovered the bodies in the mine. Elisabeth’s horrible death and divine life inspired the Russian Orthodox church to canonize her in 1981 and declare her a martyr in 1992 (after, notably, the fall of the Communist regime that killed her).
N
OOR
I
NAYAT
K
HAN
: T
HE
R
ESISTANCE PRINCESS WHO DIED WITH
“
LIBERTÉ
”
ON HER LIPS
Princess Noor Inayat Khan, heroine of World War II, deserves a whole chapter, a whole book to herself. The daughter of an Indian father and American mother, Noor was a descendent of Indian Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century “Tiger of Mysore” who held off the British East India Company with the first military rockets ever used. Though gentle—before World War II, she was a harpist, a children’s book writer, and a Muslim Sufi pacifist—she clearly inherited some of Tipu’s martial strength.
In 1940, Noor joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and trained to be a wireless operator. Two years later, Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) deployed her to Nazi-occupied France as a wireless operator, armed only with a false passport and a pistol, codenamed “Madeleine.” At 29 years old, she was the first female wireless operator in occupied France. By the summer of 1943, as the Gestapo ferreted out cell after
cell, she was doing the work of six operators and virtually running Resistance communications.
Noor was betrayed by a contact and, after three months on the run, was caught by the Gestapo. She fought like a tiger and tried to escape, climbing out a bathroom window, but she was caught. Regarded by the Germans as uncooperative and dangerous, she spent 10 months in solitary confinement in chains, beaten, starved, tortured, and condemned to “
Nacht und Nebel
” (Night and Fog), the code reserved for people who were to be disappeared. But she never talked. Noor was executed by the Nazis on September 13, 1944, at Dachau prison camp, shot through the back of the head. Her last word was “
Liberté
.”
Noor was posthumously awarded Britain’s George Cross, making her one of only three women from the SOE to receive the honor, and France’s Croix de Guerre for her bravery. It took a years-long campaign and the concerted effort of many people, but in 2012, Princess Anne unveiled a bronze bust of the spy princess that now graces a London park.
ELECTED
B
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