Violette Reine Elizabeth Szabo, GC (née Bushell; 26 June 1921 – February 1945) was a British-French Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent during the Second World War and a posthumous recipient of the George Cross. On her second mission into occupied France, Szabo was captured by the German army, interrogated, tortured and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, where she was executed. Early life Violette Bushell was born on 26 June 1921 in Paris, France, of parents Charles George Bushell and Reine Blanche Leroy, as the second child of five and the only daughter. Szabo's father, son of a publican from Hampstead Norreys, was serving as a British Army driver in France during the First World War when he met her mother, a dressmaker originally from Pont-Remy, Somme. After the war the couple lived in London, where Charles worked as a taxi-driver, car salesman and shopkeeper. During the early 1930s, as a result of the Great Depression, Bushell and her youngest brother, Dickie, lived with their maternal aunt in Picardy, northern France. The family was reunited in South London when Violette was 11 years old. She was an active and lively girl, enjoying gymnastics, long-distance bicycling and ice-skating with four brothers and several male cousins. Bushell was regarded as a tomboy, especially after being taught to shoot by her father; her shooting was reputedly very accurate. While Bushell had temporarily lost the ability to speak English in Picardy, she quickly relearned the language while attending school in Brixton. There she was reportedly popular and regarded as exotic, owing to her ability to speak another language. Her home life was loving, though she often clashed with her strict father and once ran away to France after an argument. The family, except her monolingual father, would often converse in French. At the age of 14, Bushell went to work for a French corsetière in South Kensington and later worked at retailer Woolworths in Oxford Street. At the outbreak of the Second World War, she was working at Le Bon Marché, a Brixton department store. Second World War In early 1940, Bushell joined the Women's Land Army and was sent to carry out strawberry picking in Fareham, Hampshire, but she soon returned to London to work in an armaments factory in Acton. She met Étienne Szabo, a decorated non-commissioned officer in the French Foreign Legion of Hungarian descent, at the Bastille Day parade