Back from London! A wonderful trip. Lots of people being Christmas-busy and a lot to see.

One thing Viola (my girlfriend) wanted to take a look at was the Imperial War Museum, because she has always been interested in the Second World War, especially the SOE (Special Operations Executive, the secret agency of that war) and the codemasters there, D-day, concentration camps and El Almein, without herself really knowing why.

There we saw the Women at War-exhibition and learned about a French/British female FANY (The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Princess Royal’s Volunteer Corps)) SOE secret agent called Violette Szabo. During the course of the war, SOE F Section (France) alone, put 39 female agents in to the field and she was one of them. An extremely heroic woman who were parachuted deep into France the day after D-day to gather intelligence about the German forces. She was captured after a fierce gunfight with German soldiers and was executed after an interrogation were she was tortured. Viola began crying involuntarily when she learned about her which surprised me.

What is funny here is that my girlfriend has chosen her own name (she uses her middle name as a given name), “Viola”, which is a variant of “Violette”. Furthermore her interest in D-day & concentration camps fits perfectly with Szabo being sent into France the day after D-day and executed in a concentration camp. And Szabo’s love, a Captain in the French Foreign Legion, Etienne Szabo was killed in El Almein. And to top that, a codemaster named Leo Marks wrote a poem for her to use as a code poem to use in France.

If you believe in reincarnation, you could surely draw some parallels here…? I don’t know. But what I do know is that Szabo was a remarkable woman and that the trip to the War Museum was brilliant, even though these things hasn’t caught my attention in the past.

Ghosty

⇢ A study room at the Imperial War Museum

Stripes

On this day...

... in 2004: X-mas again