The Other Agents — Sonia Olschanezky

image-Photograph 1 of Sonia Olschanezky Codename(s): Tania

This brief biography and the accompanying images have been extracted from Flames in the Field, copyright © 1995 by Rita Kramer.
I am most grateful to her for agreeing to contribute to the web site.

image-Photograph 2 of Sonia Olschanezky Sonia Olschanezky's family were among the many refugees fleeing westward from the threat of war and growing anti-Semitism in the countries of eastern Europe in the 1930's only to find themselves trapped when France surrendered to the Nazis. Born in Chemnitz in eastern Germany in 1923 to a comfortable bourgeois family, she was seven years old when she arrived in Paris via Romania. While still a schoolgirl she was invited to join a dance company and soon embarked on a career as a professional dancer which was cut short by the invasion and occupation. As the noose tightened around Jewish refugees and even Jews who were French citizens, it became more and more difficult to evade the roundups by the French police which led to internment and then onto the trains moving east to the death camps.

Sonia and her family managed to elude the authorities; one of her brothers was in the French army and the other became a messenger for the underground. Sonia herself was recruited as an agent for Robin (Juggler), the Jewish réseau connected to the Prosper network, through one of its leaders, Jacques Weil, in the spring of 1942.

She rose to the rank of sous-lieutenant, * operating in the area of Châlons-sur-Marne northeast of Paris, carrying messages from agents of one réseau to those of another, participating in the planning sabotage actions and transporting wireless parts hidden in the basket of her bicycle along with operation instructions to W/T operators in outlying areas. She managed to escape capture even in the disastrous sweep of arrests of Prosper agents and their contacts in June of 1943, but her decision to stay behind rather than leave her mother and brother behind and flee to Switzerland with Weil doomed her.

image-Photograph 3 of Sonia Olschanezky She was now in charge of what was left of Robin, but she could not hold out for long. She was betrayed and arrested in January 1944 when, responding to a message arranging for a meeting with an agent presumably just arrived from England, she was met instead by the Gestapo. Little is known about the details of her imprisonment until she joined Andrée Borrel, Diana Rowden, and Vera Leigh on the way to Natzweiler, where they were murdered. Because she was recruited in the field and not trained by SOE, there was no record of her name or activities at SOE headquarters and it was not until the 1950's that detective work by journalist-author Elizabeth Nicholas revealed the identity of "the fourth woman" killed at Natzweiler and another 20 years before the names of all four were inscribed on a plaque in the crematorium where their lives ended.

Sonia Olschanezky was 21 years old.