Shyam Benegal
“An outstanding story. The book is the first authoritative biography of Noor Inayat Khan, very well researched and recreated. It’s crying to be made into a film.”
Professor M.R.D. Foot
“This is a story not to be missed.”
The Daily Mail, Christopher Hudson
“One of the most inspirational stories of World War II” “Reading this book is like watching a butterfly trapped in a net.”
The Independent, Boyd Tonkin
“Shrabani Basu has pieced together Noor’s story more fully and reliably than ever before…Thanks to her book, a new generation can grasp what Noor did, and how she did it, with much greater clarity.”
Khuswant Singh, eminent historian and columnist
“The true life story of Noor Inayat Khan is the stuff legends are made of. It makes compelling reading.”
Phillip Knightley, author
“A disturbing book. Shrabani Basu approaches her well researched book with a cool-head and perceptive eye.”
Daily Express, Paul Callan
“Her thrilling but sad story is told in this book.”
Times Literary Supplement, Mark Seaman
“This is a story that deserves retelling almost sixty years after the award of a posthumous George Cross… a welcome addition to a field of study that will doubtless continue.”
Hindustan Times, Dinesh Seth
“This moving book tells a powerful, sad story about a girl who found it impossible to remain just a girl.”
Outlook magazine, Raja Menon
“This is an absorbing true story…the story of a gentle Indian girl in brutal captivity has never been researched so completely.”
The Hindu, Anita Joshua
“Shrabani Basu pieces together Noor’s life and brings to India a forgotten daughter.”
The Asian Age, Nayare Ali
“The book makes for compelling reading. Its sensitive narrative makes it a gripping account.”
Eastern Eye, Aditi Khanna
“Sixty years after her death at the hands of the Nazis…the book reveals the life of the war hero that Britain forgot.”
Worker’s Publication Centre, Chris Coleman
“Shrabani Basu’s story of Noor Inayat Khan’s life and heroic sacrifice has been painstakingly researched and told with great compassion and deep respect. It is a story of supreme courage worth reading again and again and repeating.”
To my sisters,
Nupur and Moushumi
A mermaid once went in a ship
Upon the stormy sea,
And as she sailed along, the
Waves arose and sprung in glee,
For on the ship she hung a lamp
Which gave a light so sweet,
That anyone who saw its glow
With joy was sure to meet.
Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan (age 14),
The Lamp of Joy
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the encouragement of many people who went out of their way to help me.
I would like to thank Noor’s family, her brothers, Vilayat Inayat Khan and Hidayat Inayat Khan, who despite ill health and pressing work commitments for their Sufi orders, took the time to talk to me and give me details of Noor’s life. Thanks to Hidayat for allowing me generous use of Noor’s stories, poems, documents and family photographs. Sadly, Vilayat did not live to see the publication of the book. Thanks also to Noor’s cousin, Mahmood Youskine, who filled me in with many interesting family details, and to David Harper, Noor’s nephew, for his insights. I would have been lost without the warm and efficient Hamida Verlinden, from the Sufi Headquarters at The Hague, who helpd me with Noor’s papers, and Martin Zahir Roehrs, Vilayat’s assistant in Suresnes, who made every meeting possible. Thanks also to Amin Carp from East West Publications at The Hague for his help.
To Professor M.R.D. Foot for meticulously reading each chapter and helping me at every stage, I owe my heartfelt gratitude. I could not have asked for a better guide. I would also like to thank him for writing the foreword to this book.
I am indebted to Jean Overton Fuller, too, for sharing her precious memories of Noor and providing her insights into her friend’s life. I am also grateful to her for allowing me to quote material from her book.
Thanks to Francis Suttill for sharing information with me about his father, Alain Antelme for all his inputs on his uncle and John Marais for sharing his memories of his mother and Noor. Thanks also to Irene Warner (née Salter) for her vivid recollections of Noor and to Emily Hilda Preston for her account of her WAAF days. Their help has been invaluable.
In Dachau, I would like to thank my wonderful guide, Maxine Ryder, and Dirk Riedel from the Dachau Museum for his inputs. In Delhi, thanks to Kamini Prakash from the Hope Project for showing me around Inayat Khan’s tomb. In Calcutta, thanks to Mohammed Husain Shah, direct descendant of Tipu Sultan, for telling me about the family history, and in Moscow, thanks to Jelaluddin Sergiei Moskalew for his helpful inputs on Inayat Khan and the birth of Noor.
Thanks also to Phillip Knightley, Michael Dwyer, Heather Williams, Sarah Helm and Chris Moorhouse and John Pitt of the Special Forces Club for all their help and advice.
I am grateful to my commissioning editor at Sutton Publishing, Jaqueline Mitchell, for her invaluable guidance, patience and encouragement, and my editors Anne Bennett, Jane Entrican and Hazel Cotton for their meticulous work.
Thanks to my daughter, Sanchita, for French translations and Klaas Van Der Hoeven for German translations. And finally, my family for their much needed moral support. To everybody, I owe this book.
Contents
Appreciation of the book
Title Page
Photo
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Map
Foreword
Introduction
Prologue
One Babuli
Two Fazal Manzil
Three Flight and Fight
Four Setting Europe Ablaze
Five Codes and Cover Stories
Six Leaving England
Seven Joining the Circuit
Eight The Fall of Prosper
Nine Poste Madeleine
Ten Prisoner of the Gestapo
Aftermath
Appendices
I Circuits linked to Prosper
II Agents and Resistance members who worked with Noor and the Prosper Circuit
III Chronology
IV Indians awarded the Victoria Cross and the George Cross 1939–1945
Notes
Bibliography
Copyright
Map of France showing the areas covered by the Prosper and other connected circuits and sub-circuits.
Foreword
Holders of the George Cross are out of the common run; Noor Inayat Khan was even farther out of it than most. She was an Indian princess on her father’s side; her mother was American. She was brought up in Paris, where she wrote and broadcast children’s stories; she had a gentle character and the manners of a lady, but lived in no luxury. She fled to England in 1940, when the Germans invaded France, and worked as a humble wireless operator on Bomber Command’s ground staff. She was plucked up into SOE, volunteered to go back to France in secret, survived for a few months in Paris but got betrayed, and was beaten up and murdered in Dachau.
What was an innocent like this doing with a pistol in her handbag? Why was she sent to France at all, in the teeth of reports that she
was quite unfit to go? Why was the prearranged code that showed she was in German hands not believed when she sent it? These are some of the questions this book raises; to some of them it can provide answers.
There are books about her already, one by a close London friend of hers who detested SOE, one in French that does not pretend to be truthful. No other biographer had access, as this author did, to her recently released secret archive, and none till now was a compatriot. Shrabani Basu, London correspondent of a leading Indian news-paper, understands from inside what her heroine must have felt during the world war about the struggle for Indian independence. This is not a story to be missed.
M.R.D. Foot
Nuthampstead
September 2005
Introduction
The lone gardener was working in the June sun clearing the weeds around Fazal Manzil, the childhood home of Noor Inayat Khan. It was a particularly hot day in Paris, a precursor to the heatwave that would sweep Europe in the summer of 2003. From the steps of Fazal Manzil, where the Inayat Khan children had often sat and played, I looked out over the hill towards Paris. The view was blocked by apartment blocks that have mushroomed in Suresnes. It was not quite the sight the children would have seen all those years back.
At eighty-seven, Pir Vilayat was a frail but impressive figure in his white robes. Walking with the help of a stick he took me to the living room with its large bay window. From here one could see the garden and the city beyond. It was in this room that he and Noor had decided that they would go to Britain and join the war effort. A large portrait of their father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, hung on the wall.
‘Every day of my life I think of her. When I go for a walk I think of her, when I feel pain, I think of how much more her pain was, I think of her in chains, I think of her being beaten. When I am cold I think of her, I think of her lying in her cell with hardly any clothes. She is with me every day,’ said Vilayat. It was a moving tribute from a brother.
I had first heard of Noor Inayat Khan many years ago in an article about the contribution of Asians to Britain. I was immediately drawn to the subject and read Jean Overton Fuller’s Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan, which was fascinating.
As an Indian woman myself, Noor’s life held a natural attraction for me. How a Muslim woman from a conservative spiritual family went on to become a secret agent, working undercover in one of the most dangerous areas during the war, was something I wanted to study in detail. The fact that Jean Overton Fuller’s book had been written over fifty years ago in 1952 made me feel it was worth making another attempt. Noor was an unlikely spy. She was no Mata Hari. Instead she was dreamy, beautiful and gentle, a writer of children’s stories. She was not a crack shot, not endowed with great physical skills and a far cry from any spy novel prototype. Yet she went on to display such courage and fortitude in the field that she was presented the highest civilian honours – the George Cross (UK) and the Croix de Guerre (France). She was one of only three women SOE agents to receive the George Cross, the others being Violette Szabo and Odette Sansom.
The opening of the personal files of SOE agents in 2003 gave me the leads I had been looking for. Though the main players in the field, Noor’s chiefs and associates at SOE – Maurice Buckmaster, Selwyn Jepson, Vera Atkins and Leo Marks – were all dead, I was confident that Noor’s own files and the files of the agents who worked with her in the field would provide fresh material. In an area like the secret service there will always be gaps which cannot be filled. Meetings are held in secret and hardly any records kept. Most of Noor’s colleagues were killed in France, murdered in various concentration camps, and few lived to tell their tale, making the job even more difficult. With the help of Noor’s family – her brothers Vilayat and Hidayat, Jean Overton Fuller’s account, SOE archives and other sources – I have tried to complete the jigsaw of Noor’s life and her final road to death.
While working on this book, I realised that Noor has been romanticised in many earlier accounts with much information about her that is pure fantasy. She has been said to have been recruited while on a tiger-hunt in India. Her father, an Indian Sufi mystic, is said to have been close to Rasputin and invited by him to Russia to give spiritual advice to Tsar Nicholas II. She is said to have been born in the Kremlin. None of this is true, though much of it has been repeated in many seminal books on the SOE.
Noor was an international person: Indian, French and British at the same time. However, she is better known in France than in Britain or India. In France she is a heroine. They know her as Madeleine of the Resistance and every year a military band plays outside her childhood home on Bastille Day. A square in Suresnes has been named Cours Madeleine after her. She has inspired a best-selling novel La Princesse Oubliée (The Forgotten Princess) by Laurent Joffrin, which has also been translated into German. Joffrin has given her lovers she did not have and taken her through paths she did not walk; it is a work of fiction.
Sixty years after the war, Noor’s vision and courage are inspirational. I hope my book brings the story of Noor Inayat Khan to a new generation for whom the sacrifices made for freedom are already becoming a footnote in history.
Shrabani Basu
November 2005
Since the publication of the book in 2006, I have had an overwhelming reaction from people who have been moved by Noor’s story. The Indian government honoured Noor in September 2006 when the External Affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, paid an official visit to her childhood home in Suresnes and said that Noor’s story of “heroism, bravery and sacrifice would always inspire the younger generation”. It was the first formal recognition of Noor Inayat Khan by the country of her ancestors. Across the Atlantic, Noor has inspired a music CD, dance compositions and a play. An international film is on the cards.
In February this year a packet dropped through my letter box from a school in Manchester. It contained a book called Liberté brought out by Year Six children as part of a project. On the cover was a child’s sketch of Noor in her WAAF uniform. Inside were imaginary dialogues and letters composed by the children, including letters Noor may have written from prison. For Noor, this tribute from children would surely have been one of the most precious. To know her story lives on is truly rewarding.
London, May 2008
Prologue
11 September 1944, Pforzheim prison, Germany
Her hands and feet chained together, classified as a ‘very dangerous prisoner’, Noor Inayat Khan stared defiantly at her German captors. Her dark eyes flashed at them as they tried to break her resistance. They had virtually starved her, keeping her on a diet of potato peel soup, struck her frail body with blows and subjected her to the dreaded Gestapo interrogation, asking her again and again for the names of her colleagues and her security checks. She had said nothing.
But at night, in the confines of her cell, she gave vent to her anger and pain. Fellow prisoners in neighbouring cells could hear her sobbing softly.
Kept in solitary confinement, unable to feed or clean herself, Noor’s mind wandered off to her childhood days. The dark German cell seemed a world away from her childhood home in France where her father sang his Sufi songs in the evening and Noor played with her younger brothers and sister. Little ‘Babuli’, as her father used to call her, had come a long way.
She was now Nora Baker, a British spy, being tortured and interrogated in a German cell. Ten months had gone by since she had been captured in France. She had a chain binding her hands together and another binding her feet. There was a third chain that linked her hands to her feet so she could not stand straight.
Her father’s words kept coming back to her, his gentle Sufi philosophy, but also his reminder to her that she was an Indian princess with the blood of Tipu Sultan in her veins. She called out silently to Abba to give her strength. And the great-great-great-granddaughter of Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, held on, though she knew the end was near.
At 6.15 that evening the men from the Gestapo entered her cell again. Noor was tol
d it was time to go. ‘I am leaving,’ she scrawled in a shaky hand on her food bowl and smuggled it out to some fellow French women prisoners. It was her last note. Still chained, Noor was led out of her cell and taken to the office.
At the prison office, Noor was met by three officials of the Karlsruhe Gestapo. She was driven in handcuffs to Karlsruhe prison, 20 miles away.
12 September 1944, Karlsruhe prison, Germany
Early in the morning, around 2 a.m., Noor met three of her fellow spies, Eliane Plewman, Madeleine Damerment and Yolande Beekman, at the Commandant’s office. Noor had trained with Yolande in England. Josef Gmeiner, head of the Karlsruhe Gestapo, told them they were being moved. Still in handcuffs, the four young women were driven in Gmeiner’s car to Bruchsal Junction to catch the express train to Dachau, 200 miles away. Their escorting officers, Max Wassmer and Christian Ott, gave them some bread and sausages for the journey.
After the confines of the prison, it felt good to be outdoors. There was a brief halt at Stuttgart where they boarded another train for Munich. The young women were given window seats in the same carriage and allowed to talk to one another. Naturally, they chatted animatedly. It was a pleasure for them to meet colleagues and speak English again. One of the women had some English cigarettes on her which she passed around. When they were finished, the German officer offered them some German cigarettes which they also smoked. It almost felt like a picnic.
On the way there was an air raid. The train pulled up at Geisslingen and waited for 2 hours. The women stayed calm as Allied aircraft flew overhead, even though they could hear the sound of the bombs. It had been three months since the Allies had landed in Normandy. The girls exchanged what information they had about the invasion.
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