vale Eileen Nearne

everyone should stop their day and spare a thought for people like Eileen Nearne - a quiet modest war hero.

(insert silence here)

you can read more about her here and here - other articles with similar themes are in most media.  She was nicknamed 'the quiet one', and worked in France during the German occupation for the British government as a radio operator who relayed and received messages between the French Resistance and British.  She was captured and tortured by the Gestapo - and apparently was silent throughout her torture - before being sent to concentration camps from where she escaped THREE TIMES. After her final escape she also survived interrogation by Americans who thought she was a Nazi.   After the war she trained as a nurse and lived the rest of her life quietly, privately and modestly. As the NYT article above claims:

As she told an interviewer several years before she died: “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.

Vale Eileen Nearne, I hope everyone stops their day for a little while to think of her.

I also think it's worthwhile reading this little whinge, about how journalists should contact experts before writing, or to edit their puff.  It's perhaps in response to this piece.

I've read a book on Nancy Wake (because she was a NZer), am currently reading this one: and now want to know more about Eileen Nearne.    Might try and get this book next.  My parents farm is  near where Sid Cotton grew up and is buried. He's another wartime hero whose story is well worth reading.  Why don't heroes of more recent wars carry any cultural cache?  I haven't read any bios from the Iraq war, although the Michael Ware doco on ABC was compelling.  Is it just me? Should I look beyond world war two? Or is it more that the 1940-50s are the era I have an interest in.