Wetaskiwin Seniors Centre
5216 54st T9A 2X1 Wetaskiwin, AB, Canada

A very brave and courageous woman during WW2. Odette Sansom GC, MBE (28 April 1912 13 March 1995), also known as Odette Churchill and Odette Hallowes, code na...med Lise, was an agent for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France during WW2. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially Germany. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. Odette was the first woman to be awarded the George Cross by the United Kingdom and was awarded the Légion d'honneur by France. She arrived in France on the 2nd of November 1942 and worked as a courier with the Spindle network (or circuit) of SOE headed by Peter Churchill (whom she later married). In January 1943, to evade arrest, Churchill and Sansom moved their operations to near Annecy in the French Alps. She and Churchill were arrested there on the 16th of April 1943 by spy-hunter Hugo Bleicher. She spent the rest of the war imprisoned in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Her wartime experiences and endurance of a brutal interrogation and imprisonment, which were chronicled in books and a motion picture, made her one of the most celebrated members of the SOE and one of the few to survive Nazi imprisonment. Her wartime record was the subject of a 1950 film, Odette, in which the title role was played by Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard played Churchill. I have read that Odette didn't want fame. She told her story and accepted her George Cross on behalf of all her comrades who did not survive. Odette died on the 13th of March 1995 in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England, aged 82. On the 6th of March 2020 Great Western Railway named a train after her. The ceremony in Odette's honour was held at Paddington Station in London on Friday morning and attended by Anne, Princess Royal who spoke there. Lest We Forget. Photograph came from the Imperial War Museums. Image file number IWM HU 3213. Information came from Wikipedia.

This is what my mum taught me