Word: skarbek
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Polish-born Christine Skarbek was indeed a beauty, slim and dark-haired, with startlingly white skin. She also had daring and skill, shown in the way she galloped her father's blooded horses over the family estate near Piotrkow or skied down the steepest Carpathian slopes. But there was little in the Countess Christine Skarbek's past to prepare her for the services for which she was praised last week. The pampered daughter of one of Poland's oldest families, she was in Addis Ababa with her second husband when Poland was overrun. Christine Skarbek, then...
...Grenade in Each Hand. The British put her to work at once. Posing as a British journalist in Budapest, Agent Skarbek commuted by ski and car across the Tatra Mountains into Poland, to organize escape routes for Polish and Allied officers. Once she and her partner, a childhood friend named Andrew Kowerski, were captured by the Gestapo, but Christine, whose poise in the presence of danger soon became legendary, talked them both out of trouble. According to British Intelligence, she was the only woman who went through six years of Allied undercover work and throve on it. Most women gave...
...Bluff in the Bastion. Like a good poker player, the Countess Skarbek could play it close to the chest or stake all on a bluff. In 1944, wanted dead or alive by the Germans, she walked boldly into a Nazi prison camp ahead of the American advance, and demanded the release of three Allied officers sentenced to be shot. ''You have three important prisoners here," she told a sergeant major. "If you shoot them, I will see to it that you yourself are shot when the Americans reach here." The authority in her words and manner...
...heard her name called. She turned around, began talking to the man who addressed her. Then the night porter heard her scream: "Get him off me!" The porter and two other men rushed up, but too late. There on the floor at the foot of the stairs lay Christine Skarbek, heroine, a wooden-handled knife thrust in her chest...
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