"Eleanor Rigby" death reveals British war heroine

[Chaser001]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68D3QN20100914

[uwe]

"However, Nearne was arrested again weeks later and was imprisoned at Ravensbrueck concentration camp before being transferred to a forced labor camp in Silesia. She escaped in April 1945 but was re-arrested, before escaping one last time."

One lucky dame. Ravensbrück was no place to be late in the war, it was overcrowded and diseases took a heavy toll among the undernourished prisoners (almost all of them women, Ravensbrück was a women's camp). But different "classes" of prisoners were treated differently (Ravensbrück also housed the wives and daughters of the German Army members that tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944, all of them survived) and the British Special Forces people must have met some grudging respect ("Eleanor Rigby" was one of four imprisoned there), even in a concentration camp (there was even a POW camp for British prisoners in the middle of Auschwitz and in a gross perversion of how the Nazi system would differentiate, these prisoners were accorded full Geneva Convention treatment while the prisoners around them were being murdered, the British POWs even stood up for the other prisoners and filed a complaint with the camp commander demanding higher food rations for the other prisoners which led to a short-lived improvement for these). Certainly, had she been Jewish or Eastern-European the attempted escape in Silesia would have seen her shot or hanged without further ado. Well, it's nice that she outlived her captors!

[Dave W]

Quite a story. She obviously didn't want attention in life. Nice that there are now people who care enough to give her a proper funeral.

[uwe]

That's her:



She had unbelievable luck: While she survived two escape attempts and was transferred from Ravensbrück, the three other female agents of her unit were shot in Ravensbrück at the end of the war to prevent them from being liberated by the approaching American forces. Had she been around, it would have been four. At least the Camp Commander responsible for it was later tried by the French and executed, well done!

Uwe