The Jewish young woman Helene Moszkiewiez (20 December 1920 – 18 June 1998) worked within the Belgian Resistance during World War II, and maintained three identities, Jewish, Belgian and German, working for two years as a clerk in Gestapo headquarters in Brussels.
Helene Moszkiewiez | |
|---|---|
| Born | 20 December 1920 Nürnberg, Germany |
| Died | 18 June 1998 (aged 77) Southampton (USA). Buried at the Jewish graveyard Beit Olam in Wayland (Massachusetts) |
| Allegiance |  Belgium |
| Unit | Belgian resistance |
| Battles / wars | Second World War |
The Germans took control of Belgium when she was 20. Two years earlier she had met a young Belgian soldier in a Brussels library. When she met him again, and he was operating with a different name while wearing a German uniform, she accepted his offer to work within the Belgian Resistance to undermine the Nazis.
After the war, Helene Moszkiewiez - whose husband didn't survive de Holocaust - remarried the British intelligence officer Albert Celmaster and in 1946 they moved to Canada, where she wrote her memoirs, Inside the Gestapo: A Young Woman's Secret War (Macmillan, 1985). Her story recalls false identity papers, helping POWs escape, working within the Gestapo, hearing screams of SS victims, stealing information to rescue Jews scheduled for transport and killing a Gestapo officer.
Movies
editThe story was made into a 1991 TV film, A Woman at War, with Martha Plimpton in the lead role. Her story also vaguely inspired Paul Verhoeven for the movie Zwartboek (Black Book).
References
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