This museum is an amazing experience, as much for its devoted and knowledgeable 88 year old curator as for its inspirational heroine. Two tiny rooms at the bottom of a garden with table surfaces and walls covered in a higgledy piggledy assortment of pictures, leaflets, books, photographs and artefacts would seem to be an unlikely setting for over an hour of intense immersion in the life of one of the bravest women of World War II. Yet such it is.
Miss Rosemary Rigby purchased a house in the Herefordshire countryside, later to discover that it had once been owned by the aunt of Violette Szabo and where Violette had spent time in her summer holidays and between missions in wartime. Believing strongly that the story of this courageous SOE operative should be preserved and told, Miss Rigby opened the museum in 2000 with the support of significant people such as Virginia McKenna (who had played Violette in the war film Carve Her Name With Pride) and Leo Marks, SOE’s cryptographer, who had given her his poem The Life That I Have for her operational code.
The brief details of Violette’s life are these - she was born Violette Bushell to an English father and French mother in Paris in 1921. After a whirlwind romance in the summer of 1940 Violette married a soldier from the French Foreign Legion, Etienne Szabo. Their daughter, Tania, was born in June 1942. Etienne’s death at El Alamein in August 1942 propelled Violette into joining SOE to take revenge for the death of her husband. On her second mission into occupied France she was captured by the German army, tortured for information and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was executed in February 1945.
But sitting in the small museum, there is no rigid chronological account of her life and achievements, instead Miss Rigby takes her small audience on a fascinating journey of specific events of Violette’s short but remarkable story, interspersed with accounts of visitors to the museum, including two male SOE operatives who had been parachuted into France with her, and Tania Szabo, her daughter.
There are some poignant artefacts such as water from the lake at Ravensbruck where the ashes of thousands of women prisoners including over 2000 who, like Violette died through execution, were unceremoniously dumped. Her posthumous medals including the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre are replicated here - the originals are now in the Ashcroft Room of the Imperial War Museum. By the end of an hour, visitors have a much greater awareness of Violette’s life and the dangers that she faced when she undertook Churchill’s instruction to “set Europe ablaze”.
There is no charge for entry but there are books and postcards for sale, and donations are encouraged. This museum is very much a creation of love and commitment ,and needs active support to keep the memory of this remarkable woman alive.
You can find the museum at Violette Szabo GC Museum, Cartref, Tump Lane, Wormelow, Herefordshire, HR2 8HN
Phone: 01981 540 477
See the museum website for visiting details
Violette Szabo's sculpture was used for the Monument to the SOE, which is next to the Thames in London