Odette (True Stories from World War II) [Paperback]

Odette tells her story to Jerard Tickell with great humility, but this was 1949. She was a brave, charming woman, who was put through terrible torture and lived to tell the tale. But I would love to know a lot more about suh an amazing person, her thoughts on civilian life, postwar Britain, her Nuremberg evidence, how her experience affected her daily life and her involvement with other ex-serviceman and victims of torture. This book is a stark, but all too brief account of her war work and early life.

This particular edition has few of the photographs shown in the original and early editions from 1949-1955, which included the woman guards at Ravensbruck at Nuremberg Court, Col. Buckmaster, British agents being dropped by parachute, Peter Churchill, Fresnes Prison, 'Arnaud', Fritz Suhren and Odette with her children 1945. But it is a must read for the war and historian reader. The current edition has Odette, and with Anna Neagle and the film crew, Odette as an old lady with her GC amongst others. It is an unfinished story as it ends in 1945 and has no biographical story after the war. Since she died in 1995 it is in need of an update now I think.

"Odette: The Story of a British Agent is perhaps the most moving of all records of war heroism. In 1942 a young Frenchwoman living in Somerset with her three little girls answered a broadcast appeal for holiday photographs to be sent to the War Office. She was invited to London for an interview, and a startling proposition was put to her. Reluctantly she accepted it. In a few months she had been trained as a British agent and, under the name of 'Celine', infiltrated into Southern France. Her run there was short but lively. She worked with the Resistance Movement, organising sabotage and the reception of parachuted agents and supplies. After six months the Germans arrested her with her commanding officer, known as 'Raoul'. So began her long ordeal in prison and concentration-camp. The Gestapo put certain questions to her; she had nothing to say, even after they had pulled out all her toenails. But her replies on other matters were such as to draw suspicion from her Commanding Officer to herself. The Gestapo condemned her to death, but did not kill her. After a year in a Parisian prison she was moved to the infamous concentration-camp at Ravensbruck. There she was buried for three months in total darkness, and witnessed the mass execution of her fellow-prisoners in the spring of 1945. To save his skin, the Camp Commandant took her with him to meet the advancing Americans. So Odette Sansom lived to receive her George Cross, the highest British decoration for gallantry that can be awarded to a woman. She also holds the M.B.E. and the French Legion d'Honneur. In 1947 she became the wife of her 'chief', Captain Peter Churchill, D.S.O., M.C.

"Absorbing, interesting, continuously exciting, and often extremely moving. It is after Odette was captured by the Germans that this tale rises to the heroic, and when I use the word 'heroic' I use it for Antigone. Nobody who claims to be living rather than existing in this crucial time of ours can afford not to read this book." - Compton Mackenzie

"I confess I could not lay it down. The story of what Odette endured makes the most moving narrative of all the war memoirs I have read." - John Gordon in Sunday Express

Odette's story, as told to a popular novelist - Mr Tickell - of her time in SOE during the Second World War

It tells the true story of Odette Hallows (Samson, Churchill), who became one of the best known SOE agents during WW2, and was turned into a film.

The book begins with her life in France as a child, and her struggle with illness induced blindness. It carries on to her arrival in Britain and her life in the SOE.

It shows her work in France with Peter Churchill (later her husband), and then her capture, torture and consequent imprisonment, how she managed to get back to the American lines and afterwards.

A riveting read. A must for anyone interested in the SOE, or just heroines of WW2