Kyrstyna was a Polish spy who inspired the character played by Eva Green in Casino Royale, and she has our thanks for that rather drop-dead gorgeous inspiration.
She also has our thanks for the pivotal role she played in occupied Poland and France.
After joining the Secret Intelligence Service in 1939, she convinced a Polish Olympic skier, Jan Marusarz, to escort her from Hungary across the Tatra Mountains, which had temperatures of -30 degrees Celsius (-20 F) at the time, and into Poland.
While in Poland, she made first contact with many agents and resistance groups which would prove invaluable to the British.
Furthermore, she smuggled Polish airmen to neutral Yugoslavia so that they could help the war effort.
When she was captured in 1941, she pretended to cough up blood by biting her tongue, telling them that she has tuberculosis.
Scars on her lungs from her job at an auto shop (emissions were pretty awful back then) confirmed the lie when German doctors took X-rays. After buying her story, they let her go and Skarbek fled to England.
She was later sent to Southern France by SOE in 1944. During her time there, she successfully scaled a 610-meter (2,000 ft) cliff to reach the Col de Larche fort, convincing the garrison of 200 fellow Poles to surrender.
She was stabbed to death on June 15, 1952, before she saw her country freed.
Part of Wiki: On 13 August 1944, at Digne, two days before the Allied Operation Dragoon landings in southern France, Cammaerts, Xan Fielding—another SOE agent, who had previously operated in Crete—and a French officer, Christian Sorensen, were arrested at a roadblock by the Gestapo. Skarbek, learning that they were to be executed, managed to meet with Captain Albert Schenck, an Alsatian who acted as liaison officer between the local French prefecture and the Gestapo. She introduced herself as a niece of British General Bernard Montgomery and threatened Schenck with terrible retribution if harm came to the prisoners. She reinforced the threat with a mercenary appeal – an offer of two million francs for the men's release. Schenck then introduced her to a Gestapo officer, Max Waem, a Belgian.
For three hours Christine argued and bargained with him and, having turned the full force of her magnetic personality on him... told him that the Allies would be arriving at any moment and that she, a British parachutist, was in constant wireless contact with the British forces. To make her point, she produced some broken... useless W/T crystals.... 'If I were you,' said Christine, 'I should give careful thought to the proposition I have made you. As I told Capitaine Schenck, if anything should happen to my husband [as she falsely described Cammaerts] or to his friends, the reprisals would be swift and terrible, for I don't have to tell you that both you and the Capitaine have an infamous reputation among the locals.' Increasingly alarmed by the thought of what might befall him when the Allies and the Resistance decided to avenge the many murders he had committed, Waem struck the butt end of his revolver on the table and said, 'If I do get them out of prison, what will you do to protect me?'
After Cammaerts and the other two men were released, Schenck was advised to leave Digne. He did not and was subsequently murdered by a person or persons unknown. His wife kept the bribe money and, after the war, attempted to exchange it for new francs. She was arrested, but was released after the authorities investigated her story. She was able to exchange the money for only a tiny portion of its value
