Noor un-Nisa Inayat
Khan was born on New Year's Day 1914 in Moscow. She was the first child of Hazrat
Inayat Khan and his American wife, Ora Ray Baker (Ameena Begum). She was of royal
descent from Tipu Sultan, the last Muslim ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore. He
refused to submit to British rule and was killed in battle in 1799. Khan's
father was a musician and the founder of the Sufi Order of the West and a
teacher of Universal Sufism. He moved his family first to London just before
the outbreak of World War I and then to Paris in 1920, where Khan was educated
and learnt fluent French. As a child, Noor was considered sensitive, dreamy and
shy but in 1927, her father died suddenly.
At the age of 13, Noor became the head of the household, taking care of
her younger siblings, her mother too stricken with grief to cope. After
studying psychology at the Sorbonne and harp and piano at the Paris
Conservatory under Nadia Boulanger, Noor turned to writing as a profession. She
wrote stories for Radio Paris and Le Figaro and published a collection
called Twenty Jataka Tales, adapted from ancient Buddhist stories for children,
which appeared in 1939. She had plans to create an illustrated children’s
newspaper called Bel Age but the war
turned her life upside down.
When war broke out in 1939, Noor fled the country just before the fall of France escaping by boat to England with her mother and sister. Noor had been raised by her Sufi father to be tolerant of other religions and as a pacifist but she was outraged by the depredations of the Nazis. "I wish some Indians would win high military distinction in this war. If one or two could do something in the Allied service which was very brave and which everybody admired it would help to make a bridge between the English people and the Indians.” She felt called to take part in the work of liberating Europe, but was dismayed by the paradox of killing to prevent violence.
But there were some who were unsure about her suitability (one SOE training report described her as ‘not over-burdened with brains’ and ‘unsuited to work in her field.’) She failed her fake Gestapo interrogation and there were worries that she wouldn’t be able to withstand the real thing. Despite these misgivings, in June 1943 she was flown to France to become the radio operator for the 'Prosper' resistance network in Paris, with the codename 'Madeleine'. Soon after she arrived in Paris, many members of the network were arrested. The Gestapo soon had all the names and addresses of current French Resistance members who were then rounded up and arrested. The SOE planned to get Noor out of France but she chose to remain, at least until they could someone to replace her. She spent the summer moving from place to place, trying to send messages back to London while avoiding capture. Between July and October, Noor sent and received messages that helped 30 Allied airmen escape, arranged for 4 agents to obtain false identity papers, and helped obtain weapons and money for members of the Resistance.
By the fall of 1943, Noor
was the last radio operator active in France. The Gestapo, who had her
description and knew her code name, made massive efforts to find her and sever
the last link between the resistance and London but for months Noor eluded them.
They failed to find her because Noor was extremely fast and she had a sixth
sense about whom she could trust and who she could not.
But in October of 1943,
Noor's luck finally ran out. She was betrayed by a Frenchwoman for 100,000 francs and arrested by
the Gestapo. Noor fought like her captors like a tigress. Unfortunately she had kept copies of all her
secret signals and the Germans were able to use her radio to trick London into
sending new agents - straight into the hands of the waiting Gestapo. Khan
escaped from prison twice, once by climbing out the window but was recaptured
each time a few hours later. In November 1943, she was sent to Pforzheim prison
in Germany where she was kept in chains and in solitary confinement. Noor soon
proved those who had doubted she had the strength to withstand torture and
interrogation wrong. Despite repeated torture, starvation, beatings and
humiliation for nearly a year, Noor refused to reveal any information. She meditated and thought of her father to
help keep her spirits up. Her courage and strength led her captors to brand her
"highly dangerous.” After refusing to sign a paper stating that she would
stop trying to escape, Noor and three other female SOE agents were transferred
to Dachau where on 13 September 1944 they were shot and their bodies consigned
to the crematorium. Her last word uttered as the German firing squad raised
their weapons was a simple “Liberté.” Days later, Dachau was in the hands of
the Allied forces, too late to save Noor and the others.
For
her courage, Noor Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross in 1949, one of
only three women to be given the award for bravery. The citation read: ‘She refused to abandon what had become the
principal and most dangerous post in France, although both given the
opportunity to return to England, because she did not wish to leave her French
comrades without communications.’ In France she was honoured with the Croix de
Guerre, where she is still revered today as “Madeleine of the Resistance.”
On November 7, 2012, The Princess Royal unveiled a sculpture of Noor, in London's Gordon Square Gardens, near the house where she lived and from where she left on her last mission. The statue, which commemorates Britain’s only female Muslim war heroine, is the first stand-alone memorial to an Asian woman in the UK. Campaigners spent years raising £60,000 for the statue from public donations. Princess Anne stated that she hoped the statue will ‘remind people to ask: Who was she? Why is she here? And what can we achieve in her memory.’ Noor deeply affected the hearts of all those she encountered, from her childhood meeting with her father's disciples, to the Nazi interrogators who destroyed her body, but could not break her spirit
Further reading:
Kathryn J. Atwood – Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Sabotage, Resistance, and
Rescue, Chicago Review Press, 2011Shrabani Basi – Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan, Sutton Publishing, 2006
Marcus Binney – The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Women Agents of SOE in the Second
World War, Coronet Books, 2003
Rita Kramer – Flames in the Field: The Story
of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France, Michael Joseph, 1995
