Eileen Nearne, spy, 89
LONDON — After she died earlier this month, a frail 89-year-old alone in a flat in the British seaside town of Torquay, Eileen Nearne, her body undiscovered for several days, was listed by local officials as a candidate for what is known in Britain as a council burial, or what in the past was called a pauper’s grave.
After World War II, Eileen Nearne, here in a photo from that era, faded into obscurity.
But after the police looked through her possessions, including a Croix de Guerre medal awarded to her by the French government after World War II, the obscurity Ms. Nearne had cultivated for decades began to slip away.
Known to her neighbors as an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past, she has emerged as a heroine in the tortured story of Nazi-occupied France, one of the secret agents who helped prepare the French resistance for the D-Day landings in June 1944. . .
Read her obituary by John F. Burns in the NYT.
For all the wartime women spies who fought against the Nazis I propose the words written on Buffy Summers’ tombstone.
“She saved the world. A lot.”
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September 25th, 2010 at 18:41
“It was a life in the shadows, but I was suited for it. I could be hard and secret. I could be lonely. I could be independent. But I wasn’t bored. I liked the work. After the war, I missed it.”
I wonder who will play her if there’s going to be a movie version in the future. Angelina Jolie? Olivia Wilde?