Sonia Olschanezky (25 December 1923 – 6 July 1944) was a member of the French Resistance and the Special Operations Executive during World War II.

[1][2][3][4] Olschanezky was a member of the SOE's Juggler circuit in occupied France where she operated as a courier until she was arrested by the Gestapo and was subsequently executed at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

Helene's father, a portrait painter from Minsk used his society contacts to arrange for Eli's release from internment after six months on condition that he report every week to the police station in Chemnitz.

[5] As an enemy alien, he was unable to work as a chemical engineer and took a job as a sales representative for a manufacturer of ladies' stockings.

The family lived a comfortable bourgeois life between the wars, with a chauffeur, a cook, and a governess for the children in their apartment on the Hellenenstrasse.

[6] In 1926 the family left Germany for Bucharest, where Eli Olschanezky had been invited to oversee the construction of, and then run, a factory producing silk stockings.

Eli Olschanezky tried to re-establish himself in business but found himself cheated of his money, which left him sick and demoralised, and the family moved to cheaper accommodation.

Her parents said no at first, but she eventually won them over, and the age of 10 she began performing with Le Théâtre du Petit Monde on Thursday afternoons, the school holiday.

While still a schoolgirl, she was now working as a performer, appearing at school dances and private affairs, using the professional name of Sonia Olys.

[11][2] Her mother contacted friends in Germany who managed to produce false papers that stated that Olschanezky had "economically valuable skills" needed for the war effort.

[13] Olschanezky was locally recruited by Jacques Weil to a small Jewish Juggler (also known as Robin) sub-circuit of SOE's Physician (also known as Prosper) circuit operating near Paris.

The agents of Prosper circuit included Andrée Borrel (courier), Francis Suttill (organizer) and Gilbert Norman (W/T operator).

Olschanezky was stationed in Châlons-sur-Marne and spent much of her time as a courier between Châlons and their headquarters in the rue Cambon, near the Place de la Concorde, using the codename "Tania" and "Suzanne Ouvrard".

[17] One action in which Olschanezky took part succeeded in blowing up a munitions train at Melun, on the Seine south of Paris.

[18] Unknown to London, Olschanezky had refused to follow Weill who fled to Bern (Switzerland) in July 1943 after the arrest of the leader of Robin (Jean Alexandre Worms) following the collapse of Prosper the previous month, leaving her in charge of what was left of Robin and taking immense risks by running messages between different SOE groups that were likely compromised by this collapse.

Occasionally, they could hear Allied bombers headed for targets within Germany as the war was apparently coming to its end and the prisoners could hope to be liberated in due course.

[27] Some time between five and six in the morning on 6 July 1944, not quite two months after their arrival in Karlsruhe, Borrel, Leigh, Olschanezky and Rowden were taken to the reception room, given their personal possessions, and handed over to two Gestapo men who then escorted them 100 kilometres south-west by closed truck to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in France, where they arrived around three-thirty in the afternoon.

[31] Albert Guérisse, a Belgian army physician who had headed the Pat O'Leary escape line in Marseille,[32] recognized Borrel as one of his former helpers.

[38] According to a Polish prisoner named Walter Schultz, the SS medical orderly (Emil Brüttel) told him the following: "When the last woman was halfway in the oven (she had been put in feet first), she had come to her senses and struggled.

Franz Berg was sentenced to five years in prison[40] but received the death penalty in another trial for a different crime and was hanged on the same day as Rohde.

[42] Nor was this German-born Jew honoured by the British or French governments with any medals or citations, despite her heroic exploits on behalf of these two nations.