Noor Inayat Khan (1914–1944)

Noor Inayat Khan was born into Indian royalty in Moscow, Russia. Her parents were Amina Sharada Begum (née Ora Ray Baker) and Hazrat Inayat Khan, a musician and philosopher on an extended stay with the Royal Musicians of Hindustan. During World War I, the family moved to Paris and then to London, where Noor's three siblings were born. The family returned to France in 1920. She attended the École Normale de Musique de Paris and also studied child psychology at the Sorbonne. She translated the Jataka Tales, fables about the previous incarnations of the Buddha, into English, and established herself as a writer of poetry and short stories. Her book Twenty Jataka Tales was published in 1939. That year, when World War II broke out, 25-year-old Khan went with her family to England, where she volunteered for the war effort. In 1940, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and trained as a wireless radio operator. Because she spoke fluent French, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the secret British organization set up to support resistance to the Nazis from behind enemy lines with espionage and sabotage. Khan was dropped into Occupied France in June 1943. The other British agents in her network were arrested shortly after her arrival, and the SOE wanted her to return to the UK, but she refused, saying she would try to rebuild the network on her own. She ended up doing the work of six radio operators, moving constantly to evade detection, dying her hair blonde to avoid being recognized, and carrying her wireless set in a bulky suitcase. Her radio transmissions to the SOE helping downed airmen escape and important deliveries to be made to France. In October 1943, she was captured and imprisoned by the Gestapo; in September 1944. she was sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where she was tortured and killed. She was the subject of the 2014 PBS documentary "Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story." Several biographies also have been published about her.