Wake had to fight to get the article published, but when it finally appeared in the New York Evening Journal - her stories often were published in American newspapers - it wasn’t bylined. “There is a single crack, like the sound of a breaking rock, and then a red stripe opens across the old woman’s back, splitting her dress diagonally, splitting the air with her screams.” Her long salt-and-pepper braids swish back and forth across her shoulders as her shawl drags on the ground beside her” before a Brownshirt attacks further. They turn her round and round as she cries and screams. In the novel, as Hitler’s men burn the contents of Jewish shops in a massive bonfire, the Wake character describes an old woman “tied spread-eagle to the massive waterwheel. On assignment in 1934 in Vienna’s Old Square, she and her photographer witnessed the paramilitary group publicly and viciously torturing an old Jewish shopkeeper, something the Brownshirts apparently liked to do on Fridays before the beginning of Shabbat. Well before the start of the war, Wake documented the depravity and revolting cruelty of Adolf Hitler’s private militia known as the Brownshirts. In the 1930s, Wake was an Australian expat living in Paris and had brilliantly bluffed her way into a journalism gig stringing for the European branch of the Hearst Newspaper Group. Lawhon’s exhaustively researched and vividly woven historical novel introduces readers to Wake, who was such a formidable force of nature that she led approximately 1000 French Resistance fighters, became a critical Allied asset, and eluded the Nazis so effectively that she inspired the nickname “The White Mouse.” ( The White Mouse is the title of Wake’s 1985 autobiography, currently out of print.)
But perhaps New York Times bestselling author Ariel Lawhon’s novel Code Name Hélène will finally bring her the recognition she deserves. It’s a mystery - and a travesty - that she isn’t. World War II heroine Nancy Wake should be so widely celebrated that whole bevies of schoolgirls dress up as this brave member of the French Resistance for Halloween.
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