This leaf saved my spy grandmother from the Nazis: It kept her alive in a concentration camp, now it's the most precious possession of her granddaughter - who reveals her extraordinary story
In 2019, Sophie Parker was at home in Surrey, going through a book that had belonged to her grandmother. Tucked inside the pages she discovered a leaf. It was small; no larger than a little finger. Parker, now 57, was stunned. Quickly, she told her elder sister, Nicole Miller-Hard, 61, who was living in New Zealand.
When Miller-Hard flew back to the UK, Parker met her and they drove to present the leaf to the Imperial War Museum. In the car, Parker placed the leaf in her sister’s hand. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ says Miller-Hard.
‘This little veined piece of green possibly saved my grandmother’s life.’
Parker and Miller-Hard’s grandmother was Odette Hallowes – a Frenchwoman who was part of the British Special Operations Executive in the Second World War. The SOE, as the organisation 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. Members of the SOE were also required to be fluent in 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 any holiday photographs they had of the North French coast.
The idea was to analyse the coastline, through as many images as possible, ahead of the D-Day landings. Hallowes – 30 at the time and living in Somerset with three daughters, all ten and under, and a British husband in the Army – submitted a selection and a letter. The SOE found her response and must have been impressed: inviting her to London, they asked her to join.
Odette in 194
She despaired for occupied France but did not want to leave her children. Until then, she been a mother and housewife and had zero experience of working as a secret agent – or, as the SOE called it, conducting ‘ungentlemanly warfare’.
But eventually she agreed. The children were enrolled in a boarding school and Hallowes wrote them pre-dated letters, to open week by week. ‘Things like “I hope you’re doing your homework”, or “I hope you’re not biting your fingernails,” says Miller-Hard.
What convinced Hallowes to join? ‘She had this very strong sense of duty,’ says Parker. ‘Her own father was killed in the First World War and her grandfather used to take her and her brother to visit their father’s grave every Sunday. He would say to them, “There is going to be another world war. I know it’s coming. And when it does, it will be your turn to do your duty, just as your father did his.” I think those words became engraved across her heart.’
SOE training was rigorous. Hallowes learned self-defence, how to parachute, use explosives, read Morse code and resist interrogation. When she arrived in France she joined a fellow SOE agent, Peter Churchill, and they worked closely with a radio operator, Adolphe Rabinovitch, who coded and decoded messages.
Hallowes was also sent on solo missions and coordinated aerial drop-offs of weapons and equipment. On one mission, she missed the last train home and had to spend a night in a brothel in Marseilles that was frequented by Nazis; on another assignment she hid from German forces at night in a freezing 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 surname was purely coincidence. She reckoned a fake connection to the Prime Minister might spare them both execution.
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. She was burned on her back with a red-hot poker; her toenails were pulled out one by one. The Gestapo wanted to extract information from her about the SOE, but Hallowes kept quiet. ‘She said it was as simple as making the decision, “I am not going to speak”,’ says Parker.
‘She said once she had made that decision, it was easy to stick to it.’
Odette (far left) at a family function with granddaughters Sophie (second right) and Nicole (middle), 1980s
Also, Parker adds, ‘They made one fundamental mistake when they were torturing her: they placed her in a chair that was facing a window.’ The Gestapo building in which Hallowes was being interrogated was on Avenue Foch – an enormous 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 up 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 suppose it was what we would think of today as going into some sort of meditative state.’
Hallowes was incarcerated in the Paris prison, Fresnes, and kept in solitary confinement. The Nazis condemned her to death on two counts: for being a British spy and for working with the French Resistance. Hallowes’s response was typically defiant: ‘Gentleman, you must take your pick of the counts 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 placed in solitary confinement, in an underground cell with no light.
Hallowes sat alone in total darkness for three months and 11 days. She was next door to a punishment cell and could often hear prisoners being tortured; she had no concept of whether it was night or day. According to Miller-Hard, Hallowes found a tiny piece of wood in the cell and would polish 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, she was sent to the Ravensbrück hospital and on her way back, crossing the compound, she saw something on the ground: a small leaf. The leaf was unusual – there were no trees overhanging the fences of the camp. Hallowes picked it up and guards seemed not to mind. ‘A leaf was not one of the things a prisoner [was] forbidden to have,’ she wrote in a later memoir.
‘They were totally unconscious of the significance of the treasure I had acquired. They did not know, as they slammed the door of my cell, that I held in my fingers a most potent link with the forces of life and of freedom.’
The leaf Odette found in Ravensbrück
Day after day in her cell, Hallowes would examine the leaf, tracing its veins and spine with her fingertips. The act connected her with the outside world from which she had been removed. ‘It seemed to me,’ she wrote, ‘that I touched not a leaf but a tree.’
By early 1945 it was becoming clear that Germany was losing the war and the commandant of Ravensbrück was growing anxious. Still believing Hallowes was related to Winston Churchill, he decided to hand-deliver her to the Americans.
Parker thinks he hoped it might grant him some clemency. Instead, the Americans arrested the commandant on Hallowes’s instruction and confiscated his gun. Hallowes herself kept the weapon in secret for the rest of her life; her family only discovered it decades later, after her death.
On the night of her release, the Americans offered Hallowes a warm place to sleep, but she declined. 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 recognised her’ – and settled back in Britain.
She divorced her first husband, Roy, and, making good on the lie she told the Gestapo, she married her SOE partner Peter Churchill in 1947. The couple divorced in 1956. Hallowes then married another former SOE member, Geoffrey, and they were together until she died in 1995, aged 82, at home in Surrey.
Her postwar life, it seems, was a happy and well-decorated one. There was a film, Odette, made about her in 1950, and Hallowes was awarded an MBE, the George Cross and the French equivalent, the Légion d’Honneur.
She kept her medals at her mother’s house in Kensington – until they were stolen in a burglary. Hallowes’s mother appealed to the press, and the thief, obligingly, posted the medals back with a note. He apologised for the robbery, promised he was ‘not all that bad – it’s just circumstances’, and signed off under the name ‘A Bad Egg’.
Still, for all Hallowes’s accolades, Parker and Miller-Hard do not remember her discussing her SOE work often – and when she did it was to acknowledge her female SOE colleagues who did not survive. Instead, their grandmother’s work was revealed in unspoken signs: her ongoing cough, cases of bronchitis, frequent visits from the doctor to tend to her wounded feet.
Hallowes was frank and unromantic about the war and its consequences. In the final paragraph of her memoir she wrote about Ravensbrück, saying, ‘Military victory was won and I was one of the few who returned to tell the tale… But now I ask myself the extent of the victory. With great sadness I believe that the choice made between liberty and slavery has still to be made. We used to believe in Ravensbrück that those of us who survived could enter a more tolerant and tranquil world whose leaders would have learnt the age-old lesson that man is made in God’s image and must bear God’s dignity.
In the war we fought a human enemy; one who had been infected with the germ of inhumanity. Although we defeated the enemy we failed to defeat the parasite. That same parasite of inhumanity is about the world today and, unless it is destroyed completely, the camp of Ravensbrück will only be the shadow and the symbol of a greater darkness to come.’
Today, Hallowes’s leaf is kept in Parker’s home. It is 80 years old, slightly shrivelled and curling at the ends. But somehow it has remained tinged a soft green.
‘It’s extraordinary,’ says Parker. ‘There are still life forces in that leaf.’