In 2019, Sophie Parker was at her home in Surrey reading a book that had belonged to her grandmother. Hidden between the pages she discovered a leaf. He was little; no bigger than a little finger. Parker, now 57, was stunned. He quickly told his older sister, Nicole Miller-Hard, 61, that she lived in New Zealand.
When Miller-Hard flew back to the UK, she was met by Parker and driven to present the sheet to the Imperial War Museum. In the car, Parker placed the sheet in her sister’s hand. “I couldn’t believe it,” Miller-Hard says.
“This little piece of veined green possibly saved my grandmother’s life.”
Parker and Miller-Hard’s grandmother was Odette Hallowes, a Frenchwoman who served in the British Special Operations Executive in World War II. The SOE, as the organization was known, was formed in 1940. Its agents were trained to conduct reconnaissance and sabotage in Nazi-occupied Europe and to work with local resistance armies. SOE members also had to master the language of the country they were infiltrating.
Hallowes joined the SOE almost by accident: in 1942, the UK government asked British citizens to send in any holiday photographs they had of the northern coast of France.
The idea was to analyze the coast, through as many images as possible, before the D-Day landings. Hallowes, who was 30 years old at the time and lived in Somerset with three daughters, all under the age of ten, and a British husband in the army, presented a selection and a letter. The SOE found her answer and she must have been impressed: inviting her to London, they asked her to join.
Odette in 1947
She despaired of occupied France but did not want to leave her children. Until then, she had been a mother and housewife and had no experience working as a secret agent or, as the SOE called it, running an “ungentlemanly war.”
But finally she agreed. The children were enrolled in boarding school and Hallowes wrote them pre-dated letters, to be opened week after week. ‘Things like “I hope you’re doing your homework” or “I hope you’re not biting your nails,” says Miller-Hard.
What convinced Hallowes to join? “He had a strong sense of duty,” says Parker. ‘Her own father died in the First World War and her grandfather used to take her and her brother to visit her father’s grave every Sunday. She told them: “There is going to be another world war. I know it’s coming. And when he does, it will be your turn to do your duty, just as your father did his. I think those words were engraved in his heart.”
The formation of state companies was rigorous. Hallowes learned self-defense, how to parachute, use explosives, read Morse code, and withstand interrogations. When he arrived in France, he joined a fellow SOE agent, Peter Churchill, and they worked closely with a radio operator, Adolphe Rabinovitch, who encoded and decoded messages.
Hallowes was also sent on solo missions and coordinated air deliveries of weapons and equipment. On one mission, he missed the last train home and had to spend a night in a Marseille brothel frequented by Nazis; On another mission he hid from German forces at night in a frozen river.
But in 1943, Churchill and Hallowes were betrayed by a double agent and arrested by the Gestapo. Thinking quickly, Hallowes told the officer that she and Churchill were married and that he was Winston Churchill’s nephew. This was a lie: the shared last name was pure coincidence. She considered that a false connection with the Prime Minister could prevent both from being executed.
Odette (bottom right) at the 25th anniversary of the George Cross at Guards Chapel, London, 1965
Hallowes was sent to occupied Paris, where she endured interrogation and torture. They burned her back with a red-hot poker; She pulled out her toenails one by one. The Gestapo wanted to get information from her about the SOE, but Hallowes remained silent. “She said it was as simple as making the decision: ‘I’m not going to talk,'” Parker says.
“He said once he made that decision, it was easy to stick to.”
Odette (far left) at a family function with her granddaughters Sophie (second right) and Nicole (center), 1980s.
Furthermore, Parker adds, “they made a fundamental mistake when torturing her: they placed her in a chair that was facing a window.” The Gestapo building where Hallowes was being interrogated was on Avenue Foch, a huge street in an expensive area of the capital. It was lined with trees and ended at the Arc de Triomphe.
Hallowes was in a room several floors above, and from the window she could see the tops of the trees. “She said, ‘I just decided I had to transport myself away from where I was and put myself in those trees.’ I guess it was what we would consider today as entering a kind of meditative state.
Hallowes was imprisoned in the Paris prison, Fresnes, and kept in solitary confinement. The Nazis sentenced her to death on two charges: for being a British spy and for working with the French Resistance. Hallowes’ response was typically defiant: “Knight, you must choose between the earls because I can only die once.”
And so, exactly 80 years ago this month, in June 1944, Hallowes was sent to Ravensbrück in Germany, an all-female concentration camp with more than 50,000 prisoners. She was again confined in solitary confinement, in an underground cell without light.
Hallowes remained alone in total darkness for three months and 11 days. He was next to a punishment cell and could often hear the prisoners being tortured; He had no idea if it was day or night. According to Miller-Hard, Hallowes found a small piece of wood in the cell and polished the floor with it: “That kept her sane.”
As the winter of 1944 approached, Hallowes was moved to a cell on the ground floor of the camp, which had a small window. One morning he sent her to the Ravensbrück hospital and, upon returning, crossing the premises, he saw something on the ground: a small leaf. The leaf was unusual: there were no trees overhanging the camp fences. Hallowes picked him up and the guards didn’t seem to care. “A leaf was not one of the things a prisoner was forbidden to have,” he wrote in his later memoirs.
‘They were totally unaware of the importance of the treasure he had acquired. They did not know, as they closed the door of my cell, that I had between my fingers a very powerful link with the forces of life and freedom.’
The leaf that Odette found in Ravensbrück
Day after day, in his cell, Hallowes examined the blade, tracing its veins and spine with his fingertips. The act connected her to the outside world from which she had been expelled. “It seemed to me,” she wrote, “that she had touched not a leaf but a tree.”
In early 1945 it became clear that Germany was losing the war and the commander at Ravensbrück became increasingly anxious. Still believing that Hallowes was related to Winston Churchill, he decided to hand her over to the Americans personally.
Parker believes he was hoping to be granted some leniency. Instead, the Americans arrested the commander on Hallowes’ instructions and confiscated his gun. Hallowes herself kept the weapon a secret for the rest of her life; her family did not discover it until decades later, after her death.
On the night of her release, the Americans offered Hallowes a warm place to sleep, but she refused. After so many months trapped in a cell, she said she wanted to feel the fresh air. She was reunited with her children (according to Parker, she “was so thin they barely recognized her”) and settled back in Britain.
She divorced her first husband, Roy, and, fulfilling the lie she told the Gestapo, married her SOE associate, Peter Churchill, in 1947. The couple divorced in 1956. Hallowes then married another former SOE member, Geoffrey, and they were together. her until she died in 1995, aged 82, at her home in Surrey.
His post-war life was apparently happy and well decorated. A film, Odette, was made about her in 1950, and Hallowes was awarded an MBE, the George Cross and her French equivalent, the Légion d’Honneur.
He kept his medals at his mother’s house in Kensington, until they were stolen in a robbery. Hallowes’ mother appealed to the press and the thief kindly returned the medals with a note. He apologized for the theft, promised that “it wasn’t that bad, it’s just circumstances” and signed under the name “A Bad Egg.”
Still, for all Hallowes’ praise, Parker and Miller-Hard do not remember her speaking often about her work in the SOE, and when she did it was to acknowledge her female colleagues in the SOE who did not survive. Instead, her grandmother’s work was revealed in unspoken signs: her continuous cough, cases of bronchitis, frequent doctor’s visits to tend to her injured feet.
Hallowes was frank and unromantic about the war and its consequences. In the last paragraph of his memoirs, he wrote about Ravensbrück: ‘The military victory was won and I was one of the few who returned to tell the story… But now I wonder the extent of the victory. With great sadness I believe that the choice between freedom and slavery has not yet been made. At Ravensbrück we believed that those of us who survived could enter a more tolerant and peaceful world whose leaders would have learned the ancient lesson that man is made in the image of God and must bear the dignity of God.
In war we fight against a human enemy; one who had been infected with the germ of inhumanity. Although we defeated the enemy, we could not defeat the parasite. That same parasite of inhumanity affects the world today and, unless it is completely destroyed, the Ravensbrück camp will only be the shadow and symbol of a greater darkness to come.’
Today, the Halloween leaf is kept in the Parker home. He is 80 years old, slightly wrinkled and curly at the ends. But somehow it has remained tinged a soft green.
“It’s extraordinary,” Parker says. “There are still life forces in that blade.”