Late last night before bed, after an evening of wading in mathematics, to take my mind off that stuff I was sniffing photos in a Time Life Book on the Resistance in Europe during World War II, a period of history for which I have endless fascination. I suppose this is because boys never grow up, and will always harbour romantic notions about distant wars.

Some of episodes described in this book were already familiar to me such as the daring sabotage attack on the German Heavy Water Plant in Norway via an book excerpt in the Indian version of Reader's Digest many years ago, or the assasinations of German Military officers carried out by the French Resistance, as shown in that old movie The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. However what caught my attention last night was this small section in the book that described the sterling work done by thousands of women in the Resistance. In particular, this photograph of a lady called Noor Inayat Khan caught my eye, and I was off on a chase in cyber-ia.

Noor had had a storied life. She was born to an Indian father (who was a descendant of Tipu Sultan) and an American mother in Moscow, and grew up in Tzarist Russia before the family was displaced to first England, from where poverty and prejudice caused a move to France. She went to Sorbonne, where she studied music and languages, and later became a freelance writer, who wrote stories for children. Then the war broke out, and she and her family evacuated to England, where she studied to become a nurse.

Subsequently she was recruited by the British SOE, and was parachuted into France to be a wireless operator codenamed "Madeliene". She was subsequently captured by the Gestapo, taken to Dachu, and executed by the German SS. This is a more detailed version of these events.

Obviously, since a life as intruiging as Noor's can't be kept away from the grubby hands of fiction, a novel losely based on her life called 'The Tiger Claw' by Shauna Singh Baldwin was recently published. Dammit! Why did I get to this story before! A more well known, i.e., best selling novel with similar thematic material is 'Charlotte Gray' by Sebastian Faulks. This novel is supposedly based on the life of another inspiring SOE agent, Nancy Wake. I actually picked up this novel for real cheap at a sale a few months ago.So now I think, it is time for me to unearth it from my book stacks and read it.