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I'm Helena Bonham Carter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

A series of rarely heard tales from World War II.

We weren't supposed to tell anybody, nobody.

There was just this peaks of her she could never talk about, which was being a spy.

The brave and brilliant exploits of these men and women often remained a mystery, even to their own families.

The cousin called to say that there's a lot of news about your father. It's just been released

into the papers and on the radio. We'll hear of remarkable missions. She wasn't sure where she was

going or what she had to do. She received a brown envelope and says, do not open it until you get on the plane.

We would like you to join the British Union of fascists.

Go along, get involved, see what you can find out.

Creativity and cunning.

It really was almost certainly the best and most successful prison breakout of the war of its type.

We pretended that we were the real troops so that the real troops could do their thing, mouths up the Rhine,

because the Germans would think we were them.

And life-threatening risks.

That is a morning that is seared into my memory.

I will never, never be able to forget the terror of that morning.

So if at some point he would be found that he's sheltering Jews in his house, with no doubt

he would be shot.

They knew they were going to be caught. And actually that was sort of part of the plan.

This was a story of constant Jewish resistance, defiance, rebellion, resilience, struggle.

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