Tote bag featuring French born Odette Marie Céline Brailly (1912-1995), the incredibly courageous Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent - and mother of three - who survived Ravensbrück concentration camp and the first woman awarded the George Cross.
The bag is hand printed on both sides, with one side giving a brief description of her life and achievements and the other side displaying a picture and a quote. It is made of 100 % cotton, measures 42 by 38 cm and is machine-washable with cold water.
One side of the bag reads:
Odette Marie Céline Brailly (1912-1995) was a French born, Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent for Britain during World War II, who survived Ravensbrück concentration camp and the first woman awarded the George Cross.
In 1931, while living in France, Sansom met an Englishman, married him and moved with him to London. They had three daughters.
After answering a radio appeal for photographs of the French coast during the second World War, Sansom mistakingly wrote to the War Office and was recruited for the SOE. As cover for her spy work, she was enrolled in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), an all-female charity, active in both nursing and intelligence and was sent to France in 1942.
Samson’s aim was to get in touch with the local Resistance, but within a fortnight of her arrival, the Germans invaded southern France - as a revenge for the Allied invasion of north-west Africa - and everything changed. She started working with Peter Churchill, leader of a local SOE network and the two of them fell in love.
They were betrayed in 1943, and used a cover story that they were actually married and that Churchill was a nephew of the British Prime Minister. Sansom took all responsibility upon herself, sparing Churchill from interrogation and refused to give up information despite being branded and having her toenails pulled out.
They were sentenced to death, but never executed and Sansom was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. This all-women forced labour camp north of Berlin was set up in 1938 for ‘non-conformist’ women: prostitutes, abortionists, social outcasts, supporters and members of the resistance, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, lesbians, habitual criminals and communists, socialists, gypsies and other useless or ‘inferior beings’.
Samson was held in solitary confinement on a starvation diet, forced to endure and listen to torture, until admitted to the camp hospital with tuberculosis. She later gave evidence against her captor; the camp commandant, who was sentenced to death in 1950, partly due to the evidence Sansom gave at the Nuremberg trials in 1945/46.
After the war Sansom divorced her husband and married Peter Churchill and for a time, in the early 1950s, they were a pair of national idols.
Sansom remained active in veterans' groups and in 1994 returned to Ravensbrück for the first time to unveil a monument to the other SOE women; Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo, who were killed at the concentration camp.
Her story was told in the film ‘Odette: The Story of a British Agent’ (1949), and in the film ‘Odette’ from 1950. One of four female George Cross recipients, she remains the only one to have received it while alive.
In 2015, the book, ‘If this is a woman’ by the British journalist Sarah Helm, was published about the lives and deaths of the thousands of women prisoners in Ravensbrück concentration camp. It paints a shocking but insightful picture of this deeply disturbing time in European history.
Sansom died at her home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey in 1995. She was 82.
A bag that is not only handy but also a great way to spread information and educate people in a playful way and - obviously - using a cotton bag instead of plastic is also good for the environment.
Besides this it is a bag that does good on every level: 10 percent of the profit from the sale of each bag is donated to one of the four charities listed below. All these charities defend girls and women's rights and support or protect the independence of women.
1. Terre des femmes in Germany
2. Freedom charity in the UK
3. The AHA Foundation in the USA
4. Femmes for Freedom in the Netherlands
The whole set of 6 different anti Nazi spies for £70 instead of £ 84, so one bag free!
Free postage anywhere or come and have a look and pick them up from our market shop in Bricklane in east London. For the address and opening times please check our face-book page at pacwomanproductions.com
Let’s honour and bring back the memory of some real heroines by acknowledging their achievements and not forget what they fought for!
For whole sale enquiries please contact us and we'll be in touch asap.
Thanks for your interest!