I’m going face to face with a forgotten war heroine

She was, her wartime colleagues said, “one of the finest members of the service.” For over six years Krystyna Skarbek had risked her life for Britain’s Special Operations Executive, saving the lives of several fellow officers and stunning the head of SOE with her “spirit and courage”. This Polish-born countess, under her nom-de-guerre of Christine Granville, was not only the first but also the longestserving female special agent of the Second World War. She won an OBE, a George Medal, the French Croix de Guerre. And until very recently, almost nobody knew what she did.

Christine was en route to her second husband’s diplomatic posting in southern Africa when the Nazis invaded her homeland in September 1939. She was so incensed she demanded the British secret services take her on immediately. Despite being a foreign national, Jewish on her mother’s side, and, perhaps most controversially, a woman, before the end of the year she was preparing to ski across borders to smuggle money and propaganda in to the fledgling Polish resistance. She brought back vital radio codes and information on German troop movements.

In 1941 she also retrieved the first microfilm footage of Nazi preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union, hidden in her gloves. Winston Churchill’s daughter later claimed that as a result Christine became her father’s favourite spy.

Christine was arrested more than once, but always talked her way out of danger. Nevertheless, her time in Poland was limited. Staying one step ahead of the enemy in her one-legged lover’s Opel Olympia, she moved on to work in Turkey, Egypt and the Middle East.

But it was after being parachuted into occupied France in the summer of 1944 that Christine undertook the work that made her legendary among the special forces. She independently secured the defection of a strategic Nazi garrison high in the Alps, and saved the lives of three fellow officers, all men, who were due to be executed by firing squad.

Tragically, just seven years after the end of the war, Christine was murdered in Kensington; she was stabbed through the heart with a commando knife much the like the one she had carried on missions.

Although there were plans for books and films to celebrate her life, an influential group of her friends and former colleagues felt that the world was not ready for her story in 1952. Her name, face and achievements were slowly forgotten.

That will change this evening when a new bronze bust of Christine is unveiled at the Polish Hearth Club in London.

Christine often came here to dance after the war, reportedly transfixing a crowd of admirers with her tales, so there could not be a more fitting place to remember her. Awardwinning artist Ian Wolter has sculpted her likeness from photographs, and last week, he added to the casting of the bronze a handful of Polish and British soil. The plinth too is Polish spruce from the forests through which she would have skied on her first active mission.

As Christine’s biographer I have been honoured to interview her friends, colleagues and relations in Poland, France, and Britain. I explored her childhood home, read her papers, and was invited to wear her jewellery, but I never expected to come face to face with this inspirational woman. This evening, I cannot wait to be transfixed.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion