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  1. I know what I have to do. One day I'll be awarded a medal for this. It's already gleaming deep inside me. -- Timothée de Fombelle, Captain Rosalie (trans. Sam Gordon) Noor-un-nisa, your Father’s pride, Modest, gentle and qualified. Graceful in manner, fair of face, Worthiest daughter by Allah’s grace. -- Pirani Ameena Begum, "Graduation Day", c. 1927 "Oh beautiful one," he exclaimed, "what has brought you to this stone of pain? Did you not know I ordered you must never be killed?" -- Noor Inayat Khan (1 January 1914 - 13 September 1943), Twenty Jataka Tales, "Banyan" I. Within the occupied territories, the adequate punishment for offences committed against the German State or the occupying power which endanger their security or a state of readiness is on principle the death penalty. II. The offences listed in paragraph I as a rule are to be dealt with in the occupied countries only if it is probable that sentence of death will be passed upon the offender, at least the principal offender, and if the trial and the execution can be completed in a very short time. Otherwise the offenders, at least the principal offenders, are to be taken to Germany. III. Prisoners taken to Germany are subjected to military procedure only if particular military interests require this. In case German or foreign authorities inquire about such prisoners, they are to be told that they were arrested, but that the proceedings do not allow any further information. IV. The Commanders in the occupied territories and the Court authorities within the framework of their jurisdiction, are personally responsible for the observance of this decree. -- Adolf Hitler, 7 December 1941 (The "Nacht und Nebel" decree) "L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c’est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l’univers entier s’arme pour l’écraser: une vapeur, une goutte d’eau suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand l’univers l’écraserait, l’homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu’il sait qu’il meurt, et l’avantage que l’univers a sur lui, l’univers n’en sait rien." [Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.] -- Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 345 When I was perhaps eleven or twelve -- this would have been the early 1990s -- I received a copy of William Stevenson's highly-sensationalized biography of Sir William Stephenson MC DFC (no relation), A Man Called Intrepid, written in 1976 and sold in such prodigious quantities that it can still be found at used booksales practically ten for a penny. Most of the book left little impression, and that was a good thing, as its accuracy is open to question. But it left a mark on me, as history can sometimes do to us, nonetheless. One of the photoplates was of a young woman named Noor Inayat Khan, Agent MADELEINE. She looked, to my eyes, impossibly beautiful, but also tired, as if she knew what was coming, what would happen, and how, and when. I once found a cat with a sparrow; the bird knew it was going to die, it had no hope of escape, and it remained very still, with a quiet dignity in the face of its own annihilation that was more unsettling than any throes of agony could be. Noor came a long way to die. She was born in Moscow in 1914 to Pirani Ameena Begum, latterly Ms Ora Ray Baker of Albequerque, New Mexico, and the Sufi Muslim mystic Inayat Khan. In an era when interracial marriages were vanishingly rare, when not illegal, in the United States (interracial marriage was only legalized nationwide in the USA in 1967), her parents would have been highly noteworthy. No doubt they probably were as accepted in Bloomsbury, to where they moved shortly before the outbreak of the Great War, as they would've been anywhere. In 1920, they moved to France, where Inayat Khan pere died in 1927, leaving thirteen-year-old Noor to help her mother raise her three younger siblings. By the time war came again in 1939, the twenty-five-year-old Inayat Khan was a published author, having written a collection of folk tales under the name of Noor Inayat. When France fell in 1940, she escaped to the United Kingdom with her mother and her siblings. In 1943, wanting to contribute more to the war effort, she volunteered for the SOE. Her identity photograph from that year shows a gentle-looking but otherwise unremarkable young woman. But photographs can lie. As an SOE operative, Noor was evaluated as something of a curate's egg; a talented harpist, she also proved an exceptionally fast and accurate W/T signaller, and she spoke fluent French. But she was also gentle, dangerously honest, and, of course, not white, not exactly, at a time when such things were painfully conspicuous to European eyes. Other trainees expressed doubts about her abilities to perform her duties operationally. But occupied Europe was a great maw, sucking up agents and digesting them as fast as they could be replaced. She was willing; she was sent. On the night of 16 June, Noor became MADELEINE, an agent of the PROSPER network in France. She was flown in by Lysander III V9353/MA-G, along with two other agents: Diana Rowden and Cecily Lefort. None of them would survive the war. PROSPER was betrayed under circumstances that remain murky to this day; possibly Henri Dericourt, a member of the network, was a German double agent, or possibly a triple agent in service to SOE's bitter rival MI6, and he gave up his colleagues either out of avarice or as part of a complicated deception plan to obscure the target of Operation OVERLORD; possibly, and more stupidly, Noor and much of the network were betrayed to the Germans out of spite in an affair of the heart. It is fair to say that SOE's level of professionalism and operational security were disastrously bad, whether by design, as some have suggested, or merely the fact that it was composed largely of enthusiastic but poorly-trained amateurs taking on the ruthless and ruthlessly professional security apparatus of a totalitarian state, or both. Regardless of what it was, her network destroyed, her colleagues captured or dead, Noor stayed on the run for three months, and continued to transmit until she herself was captured on 13 October 1943. She had eleven months left to live. Despite concerns about her ability to withstand interrogation, Inayat Khan told the Germans nothing about her work. Unfortunately, she had failed to absorb a basic precept of her training, and kept detailed notes on the messages she sent and received. Additionally, she had discussed her family with her interrogators. These two pieces of information allowed the Germans to imitate her style effectively enough that SOE believed Noor remained active, and several more agents were sent to France, and their deaths, as a result. After a failed escape attempt, Noor was classified as Nacht und Nebel -- Rückkehr Unerwünscht: Night and Fog -- Return Not Required. She was kept chained hand and foot in solitary confinement, until she was transferred to Dachau with three other SOE agents in September of 1944. (At least one person has tried to argue, on what seems to me to be largely circumstantial evidence and guesswork, that she died at Pforzheim prison of starvation. I do not subscribe to this view.) At dawn on 13 September 1944, Noor Inayat Khan, Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment and Eliane Plewman were shot. Depending on the version of the story you choose to believe, she may or may not have been beaten beforehand, her jewelry may have been taken by an SS officer (a detail which, to me, at least, rings painfully true), that the women held hands, that they wept, that three died instantly and one did not. Everyone able to tell the story afterwards had good reason to lie. Noor, who I have always thought of by her codename, Madeleine, was doomed from the moment she stepped out of the Lysander and into France. Her failures were those of inexperience, but her personal conduct was beyond reproach: she never answered any questions of an operational nature, she attempted escape, and she endured degrading solitary confinement with dignity. It was her great misfortune to be one of the easily-extinguished shafts of light sent to pierce the unending night of occupied Europe, but, in the words of Pericles, she passed from the scene, not of her fear, but of her glory. I've been eager to build the new Dora Wings Lysander since I first heard word of it, since I have a photo of the machine which carried Madeleine to her fate (which I sadly was specifically enjoined from sharing) and when I discovered the new DK Decals sheet has those markings on it, I knew what I had to do. The decals are currently winging their way to me from Hannants, and the kit itself is cleaned and on the bench. Of course it's ludicrous to pretend that building a model airplane is any sort of meaningful tribute to a woman who gave everything she had to give and more in the service of the greatest cause of the twentieth century, but I have loved her with the pure love that can only come in childhood since I first knew who she was. She was a real human being, who made real mistakes, who liked to sing, who told stories and wrote a book for children, who loved her mother, and who, ultimately, made a choice, knowing the risks, that meant that everything she ever was would come to be defined by the last year of her life. Any chance of not being a heroine, of being ordinary, of having babies or a happy marriage, or a failed marriage, or a dog, or buying groceries, or any of the million mundane things we take for granted ended for her early on the morning of 13 September, 1944. All that remains to us is her name, and what we choose to associate it with. Today would have been Noor's 106th birthday. May her name liveth forevermore.
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